2020.05 Le Meilleur de The Economist Mai 2020

Le meilleur de The Economist – mai 2020
Comme d’habitude une sélection mensuelle avec des articles intéressants autour des thématiques
suivantes :
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- Education : Closing schools / why study classical languages (Latin, Greek) / The social experiment:
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A more effective scheme than affirmative action has flown under the radar / The pandemic may
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result in some business schools closing for good / African schools : A scholar wants to prepare
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African students for world-class doctoral programmes / Troubled universities
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- Crisis : Why America’s unemployed could face a lost decade / By failing to face up to its difficulties,
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the European Union only makes them worse / Goodbye globalization / Pre-existing conditions
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have exacerbated covid-19’s blow to world trade / Covid-19 and global poverty : The number of
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poor people was steadily falling. Now it is rising fast
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Inequality : Although the poorest have so far been hardest hit, the pandemic could eventually
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lower inequality
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- Black America in peril
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- Solitude : As millions are discovering, solitude has always been both a blessing and a curse
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- China vs America
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- Scientific publishing : The pandemic has caused scientists to work faster
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Work : Offices : the shape of things to come / Working life has entered a new era
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- Keynes – biography
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- BRITAIN’S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION

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- Social mobility : Two leading economists disagree about the flagging American Dream
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- Crime and covid-19 : The pandemic is providing organised crooks with fresh opportunities
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- Climate change : The damage done by climate change will be severe, widespread and sometimes
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surprising / The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change—and creates
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a unique chance to do so / Once more, with renewables

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- The decline of London : For three decades, London was in the ascendant. Now it may have gone
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into a covid-accelerated decline

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- Transport : Walkers and cyclists are annexing roads. They might not give them back
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- Global tourism / Travel after covid (top !)

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- Masks and covid-19

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Comme d’habitude, faites Ctrl + F (ou Cmd + F sur mac) pour faire des recherches par mots clés ou pour
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trouver directement les articles mis dans le menu ci-dessus. Bonne lecture !
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The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1545 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 00:32:17

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CLOSING SCHOOLS
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No more pencils, no more books

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Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality
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1440 words
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AMSTERDAM IN THE STREETS of Amsterdam children spend the “corona holiday” whizzing around on
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scooters; their peers in Madrid are mostly stuck at home with video games; those in Dakar look after
younger siblings. The one place they are not is at school. Over three-quarters of the world’s roughly 1.5bn
schoolchildren are barred from the classroom, according to UNESCO, a UN agency. In most of China and in
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South Korea they have not darkened school doors since January. In Portugal and California they will not
return before September. Schools have striven to remain open during wars, famines and even storms. The
extent and length of school closures now happening in the rich world are unprecedented. The costs are
horrifying. Most immediately, having to take care of children limits the productivity of parents. But in the
long run that will be dwarfed by the amount of lost learning. Those costs will fall most heavily on those
children who are most in need of education. Without interventions the effects could last a lifetime. For
these reasons Singapore in 2003 cut its month-long June holiday by two weeks to make up for a fortnight
of school closures during the SARS epidemic. Closing schools even briefly hurts children’s prospects. In
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America third-graders (seven-year-olds) affected by weather-related closures do less well in state exams.
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French-speaking Belgian students hit by a two-month teachers’ strike in 1990 were more likely to repeat a
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grade, and less likely to complete higher education, than similar Flemish-speaking students not affected by
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the strike. According to some studies, over the long summer break young children in America lose between
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20% and 50% of the skills they gained over the school year. Closures will hurt the youngest schoolchildren
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most. “You can make up for lost maths with summer school. But you can’t easily do that with the stuff kids
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learn very young,” says Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University. Social and emotional skills such as
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critical thinking, perseverance and self-control are predictors of many things, from academic success and
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employment to good health and the likelihood of going to jail. Whereas older children can be plonked in
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front of a computer, younger ones learn far more when digital study is supervised by an adult. Then there
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are those who are missing crucial exams. Germany is reopening schools for final-year high-school students
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who face exams soon. But most countries are not willing to do that. China has postponed its Leaving
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Certificate exam (gaokao) until July. Britain and France have cancelled this year’s exams. Grades will in part
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be decided by teachers’ predictions of how a student might have performed. This fuels fears about
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inequality, as some experts worry teachers unconsciously discriminate against disadvantaged children and
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give them unfairly low marks. Statistics Norway estimates “conservatively” that the country’s educational
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shutdowns—from crèches to high schools—are costing NKr1,809 ($173) per child each day. Most of that is
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an estimate of how much less today’s schoolchildren will earn in the future because their education has
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been disrupted. (It is assumed they are learning roughly half of what they normally would.) The rest is lost
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parental productivity today. Of course schooling has not stopped completely, as it does during holidays.
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Nearly nine in ten affected rich countries are providing some form of distance-learning (compared with
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fewer than one in four poor countries). But video-conferencing has its limits. For poorer children, internet
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connections may be ropey. Devices may have to be shared and homes may be overcrowded or noisy. Of
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the poorest quarter of American children, one in four does not have access to a computer at home. Less
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well-off children everywhere are less likely to have well-educated parents who coax them to attend remote
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lessons and help them with their work. In Britain more than half of pupils in private schools are taking part
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in daily online classes, compared with just one in five of their peers in state schools, according to the Sutton
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Trust, a charity (private schools are more likely to offer such lessons). In the first weeks of the lockdown
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some American schools reported that over a third of their students had not even logged in to the school
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system, let alone attended classes. Meanwhile, elite schools report nearly full attendance and the rich have
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hired teachers as full-time tutors. Ashley Farris, an English teacher at KIPP high school in Denver, Colorado,
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says several of “her” kids are virtual truants. Her school worked hard to get students computers and Wi-Fi
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access, but the digital gap is only part of the story. Some must work to make up for parents’ lost wages.
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Others must look after younger siblings. Closures in Britain could increase the gap in school performance
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between children on school meals (a proxy for economic disadvantage) and those not on school meals,
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fears Becky Francis of the Education Endowment Foundation, another charity. Over the past decade the
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gap, measured by grades in tests, has narrowed by roughly 10%, but she thinks school closures could, at
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the very least, reverse this progress. At least over summer, teachers are not on tap for anyone. In the
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current lockdown some students can still quench their thirst for education not just with highly educated
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parents but also with teachers; others will have access to neither. Primary school is normally a crucial
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opportunity for gaps that emerged in early-years development to start narrowing, or at least to stop
widening. That opportunity is now being missed. For a glimpse of the cost to the unluckiest young children,
consider the Perry pre-school project of the 1960s, a study conducted in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which found
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that a control group of young children from disadvantaged backgrounds who did not attend pre-school
suffered lifelong consequences. Mr Doepke estimates that by the autumn the sizeable group of American
children whose learning loss started when schools closed might have lost as much as a year’s learning. Since
every year of education is associated with an increase in annual earnings of roughly 10%, the consequences
for those children become clear. “I fear we will see further inequality and less social mobility if nothing is
done,” he adds. What can be done to limit the costs? Finland started distance learning only when it was
satisfied that almost every child would be able to take part. South Korea extended its school holiday to
prepare teachers and distribute devices where needed. “For my school of 1,000 students, just 13 borrowed
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tablets because they had several siblings in their house,” says Hyunsu Hwang, an English teacher at Inmyung
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Girls High School, in Incheon. Teachers now use a mixture of real-time interactive classes, pre-recorded
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material and homework-based digital classes. When schools began to reopen on April 9th, official
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attendance was 98%. School systems where children are used to having to teach themselves will do better,
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reckons Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, a club of rich countries. “The real issue is if you’ve been spoon-
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fed by a teacher every day and are now told to go it alone, what will motivate you?” In Estonia and Japan
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students are used to “self-regulated activities”; across the OECD the share is nearly 40%. But in countries
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such as France and Spain, such autonomy is rare. In the end, the only way to ensure all children get an
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education is to reopen the doors. At the Alan Turing primary school in Amsterdam, it quickly became clear
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that 28 of its 190 pupils could not take part in online classes. The school now opens its doors for 15 from
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this group three mornings a week and has found other ways to help the remaining 13, such as arranging for
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them to get assistance from their neighbours. “At first it felt like we were doing something illegal,” says Eva
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Naaijkens, the headmistress, “but how can you accept a situation where a number of children just drop
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out?” She estimates that, working remotely, her teachers can impart perhaps 40% of the education they
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would normally. As well as letting final-year secondary-school students facing exams resume classes,
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Denmark has also begun to reopen crèches and primary schools. It has made a priority of the very young
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for several reasons. The early stage of learning is crucial. The burden toddlers place on parents is heavy.
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And the risk of young kids getting or spreading the virus appears low. Around the world many parents will
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be hoping their children’s schools can also safely reopen soon. Some children may have mixed feelings
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about swapping extra Xbox time for geography lessons. Tough luck: holidays have to end sometime. For
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the future well-being of whippersnappers scooting around the streets of Amsterdam, it is good news that
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Dutch primary schools will partially reopen on May 11th.■

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THE EXPERIENCE OF EBOLA Lessons learned Those who were affected by Ebola remember the impact on
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children’s education 479 words SIX YEARS ago Rosaline Margai’s secondary-school education came to a halt
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just as it was about to begin. In 2014-15 schools in Sierra Leone were closed for nine months because of
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the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. Six years later her schooling has again been interrupted. Covid-19 has
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caused Sierra Leone to close its schools and to cancel or postpone exams. Ms Margai was determined to
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start college by the age of 17. “I will turn 17 soon,” she explains. “But I fear I will not be able to take exams
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in time.” Across west Africa memories of the devastation caused by Ebola and the school shutdowns are
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still fresh. Education for 5m children was severely disrupted. The luckiest met sporadically in small groups
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in homes. Others listened to government-provided education programmes by radio. But for many, learning
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stopped altogether. Children were more likely to go to work. Sexual exploitation increased. Unplanned teen
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pregnancies rose sharply. “When you live in a country that already struggles to keep kids in school, and
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then schools are closed and poverty goes through the roof, you quickly become a candidate for child
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labour,” says Hani Mansourian of UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency. He worries about a similar dynamic
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now; with the government overstretched, it is easier for employers to hire cheap young labour. In 2014
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school closures crimped many essential services, such as nutrition and health programmes, information on
disease prevention, and access to clean water and sanitation. According to UNICEF, nearly 1m children in
Liberia were not immunised that year. When schools did reopen, many pupils did not return. Sierra Leone’s
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government banned “visibly pregnant girls” from school. In a survey in 2015 of adolescent girls asked why
they were not in secondary school, “my parents cannot afford it” soared as a reason, recalls Tom Dannatt
of Street Child, a British charity. Ms Margai remembers many kids dropping out: “Their parents would say
‘there is no need to be in school any more.’” The current crisis is in some ways worse. During the Ebola
outbreak, clubs for girls in some places provided education and support: those attending were less likely to
get pregnant than those in similarly affected areas without such groups. Social distancing means that such
efforts will be hard to replicate now. Mr Mansourian fears that the long-term consequences of covid-19 in
low- and middle-income countries will be “much more dire” than Ebola was in west Africa. Though it was
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terrible for children overall, Ebola did have the good effect of highlighting the flaws in west African
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education systems. It galvanised efforts to improve schooling, increase education budgets and reduce
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classroom crowding. “Whilst it seems early—and almost grim—to be thinking of it now,” says Mr Dannatt,
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“we should also absolutely be looking at how we can reopen education on a new level after the crisis.”
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COVID-19 INFECTIONS Think of the children The young seem to be less likely to catch or pass on covid-19
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571 words WHEN COVID-19 began spreading in January, parents everywhere were terrified. Respiratory
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bugs thrive in children; this one kills. But children infected with the new coronavirus have had mild
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symptoms or none at all and deaths have been rare, says a review of nearly 80 studies published on April
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22nd by an international network of child-health experts. Whether children spread covid-19 has been less
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clear. Experts feared they could be easily infected but show no symptoms and so spread the disease to
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adults. Children pass on flu more than adults. They are more likely to catch it than adults who have some
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immunity from previous bouts. They are in close contact with their peers. So closing schools can slow flu
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epidemics. But several studies now suggest that children are no more easily infected by covid-19 than
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adults, maybe less so. The most reliable ones have traced the contacts of infected people, tallying the
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infections in children and adults stemming from each “patient zero”. Two studies from China have just
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appeared in Science and the Lancet. One found similar infection rates; the other, in a different province,
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found that children were less susceptible. Less conclusive studies also suggest children may be less
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vulnerable. In Vo, an Italian town where almost the entire population of 3,000 was tested for infection
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twice during its outbreak, none of the 234 children under ten was infected, compared with 1-3% of the
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population as a whole. In Stockholm, however, where over 700 people were tested once, 2.8% of those
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aged between two and 15 were infected, compared with 2.5% of the whole group. These studies may miss
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infections in children who recover quickly. To catch all infections—and track when they ripple through each
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age group—requires frequent testing for both active infections and antibodies (the footprints of past
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infection), says Andrew Lover of the University of Massachusetts. Antibody-tracking studies have begun in
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Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere. The first round of the Dutch study, of more than 2,000 people,
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found that about 2% of those under 20 had been infected, against 4.2% of those over 20. Rates among
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younger children were lower than among older ones. According to the European Centre for Disease
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Prevention and Control, child-to-adult transmission “appears to be uncommon”. Researchers tracing chains
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of infections in Iceland and the Netherlands have found no cases of children infecting their families. Their
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samples are small but their observations chime with data from China. But almost all these studies were
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done when schools were closed; most countries shut them early in the pandemic. A few recent studies have
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tried to disentangle the contribution of schools—with mixed results. In one French town with a covid
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outbreak linked to a secondary school, a study with antibody tests found that 41% of staff and students at
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the school had been infected, compared with 11% of their family members. A report from New South Wales
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in Australia that tracked close contacts of 18 infected students and teachers in 15 primary and secondary
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schools, however, found that of the 735 students and 128 staff, only two children contracted the disease
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from the initial cases. No staff member was infected. But attendance at the time was low because parents
had been encouraged to keep their kids at home. More evidence will emerge as schools reopen. But so far
children do not seem to be the stealthy super-spreaders once feared. ■
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DISEASE AND LABORATORIES The origins of the virus China’s opacity has allowed dangerous conspiracy
theories to flourish 630 words WHERE DID it come from? After five months and over 225,000 deaths, the
question is the subject of a vicious spat between America and China. By far the most likely explanation is
that the virus jumped from bats to humans, perhaps via another animal such as a pangolin, at a wet market
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in Wuhan (see China section). But conspiracy theorists mutter that the bug could have escaped from one
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of the city’s laboratories, at least two of which research into infectious diseases. Some American politicians,
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including President Donald Trump, want an investigation; China retorts that the claims are “malicious”. In
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March one of its spokesmen claimed the virus might have come from America. The row risks corroding
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public confidence in the crucial work disease laboratories do around the world. It is also a reminder of why
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China’s official culture of opacity and propaganda is such a profound weakness. The virus shows no sign of
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deliberate human construction and there is no reason to doubt that it evolved entirely in the wild (see
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Science and technology section). But accidents do happen. Bugs studied during legitimate experiments in
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laboratories have escaped in the past. SARS, a virus that killed 774 people in 2002-03, slipped out of a lab
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in Beijing twice in 2004. Foot-and-mouth disease, which required the culling of 6m animals in Britain in
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2001, caused £8bn ($11.5bn) of damage. A sample later escaped from a research institute in 2007, but was
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contained. America suffered 34 laboratory-acquired infections in 2000-09, resulting in four deaths.
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American labs have accidentally shipped live anthrax, bird flu and Ebola to lower-security facilities in recent
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years. One health-security index suggests that three-quarters of countries score poorly on biosecurity.
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Ending the dispute over covid’s origins is especially important because super-secure bio-labs are becoming
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more common. There are now around 70 “biosafety level-four” sites—designed to deal with fatal diseases
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lacking a cure or vaccine—in 30 countries. America has over a dozen. China has two, one at the Wuhan
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Institute of Virology, and plans to build up to five more by 2025. If handling pathogens is nerve-jangling
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stuff, tinkering with them is risky, too. One branch of research in particular is specifically aimed at making
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diseases even more dangerous—better at hopping between humans, for instance, or more resistant to
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antibiotics. Scientists at the Wuhan lab were engaging in such experiments, known as gain-of-function, in
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collaboration with American and Italian scientists. It sounds creepy, but such work brings potential rewards,
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as scientists might understand better how a new disease might behave, aiding the development of drugs
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that could save many lives. As a result, it is crucial that governments around the world weigh the trade-offs
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involved in research, monitor breaches and encourage full transparency. Sadly, policy has been going in the
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opposite direction. Since 2017 America has had a dedicated panel to scrutinise its own laboratories, but its
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membership and workings remain regrettably opaque. On April 27th America cut funding for a group
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conducting broader research into how bat coronaviruses jump to humans, seemingly because of its
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collaboration with scientists in Wuhan. China, meanwhile, has ramped up its campaign of propaganda and
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intimidation. It threatened a consumer boycott of Australian exports after Australia’s government proposed
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an independent global review into the origins of the crisis. And it bullied the European Union over an official
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report into Chinese disinformation about the virus, with officials saying its publication would “be very bad
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for co-operation” and make China “very angry”. The world would be served by a clear account of how the
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virus made its way from bats to humans. Without one, conspiracy theories will flourish, jeopardising
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sensible scientific discovery. What is needed is rationality, co-operation and full transparency from all
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countries. Right now the world is getting the opposite.■

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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 363-368 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 09:22:07

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This less social world is not necessarily bad news for every company. UBS, a bank, reports that a growing
number of people in China say that the virus has increased their desire to buy a car—presumably in order
to avoid the risk of infection on public transport. The number of passengers on Chinese underground trains
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is still about a third below last year’s level; surface traffic congestion is as bad now as it was then. Wanting
a car, though, will not mean being able to afford one. Drops in discretionary spending are not entirely driven
by a residual desire for isolation. They also reflect the fact that some people have a lot less money in the
post-lockdown world.
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A handful of firms claim that working from home is so productive that their offices will stay closed for
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good. Yet these productivity bonuses look likely to be heavily outweighed by drawbacks. Studies suggest
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the benefits of working from home only materialise if employees can frequently check in at an office in
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order to solve problems. Planning new projects is especially difficult. Anyone who has tried to bounce ideas
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around on Zoom or Skype knows that spontaneity is hard. People are often using bad equipment with poor
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connections. Nick Bloom of Stanford University, one of the few economists to have studied working from
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home closely, reckons that there will be a sharp decline in patent applications in 2021.
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When mental capacity is taken up by worries about whether or not to touch that door handle or whether
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or not to believe the results of the latest study on the virus, focusing is difficult. Women are more likely to
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take care of home-schooling and entertainment of bored children (see International section), meaning their
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careers suffer more than men’s. Already, research by Tatyana Deryugina, Olga Shurchkov and Jenna
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Stearns, three economists, finds that the productivity of female economists, as measured by production of
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research papers, has fallen relative to male ones since the pandemic began.
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The lost jobs tended to pay badly, and were more likely to be performed by the young, women and
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immigrants. Research by Abi Adams-Prassl of Oxford University and colleagues finds that an American who
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normally earns less than $20,000 a year is twice as likely to have lost their job due to the pandemic as one
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earning $80,000-plus. Many of those unlucky people do not have the skills, nor the technology, that would
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enable them to work from home or to retrain for other jobs.

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People who already enjoy strong professional networks—largely, those of middle age and higher—may
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actually quite enjoy the experience of working from home. Notwithstanding the problems of bad internet
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and irritating children, it may be quite pleasant to chair fewer meetings or performance reviews. Junior
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folk, even if they make it into an office, will miss out on the expertise and guidance of their seniors. Others
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with poor professional networks, such as the young or recently arrived immigrants, may find it difficult or
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impossible to strengthen them, hindering upward mobility, points out Tyler Cowen of George Mason
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University.
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Less obviously, these harsh lockdowns reflect widespread distrust. Even fewer French and Spanish than
Italians think most people can be trusted: about 20%, similar to Poland. Some 25-30% trust the government,
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half as many as in Sweden. Some approve of tough rules because they mistrust fellow citizens. As a news
kiosk owner in Madrid put it: “It’s a necessary evil. People here are all kisses and hugs, they eat paella from
the same spoon.” If low-trust countries in the east are doing better than those in the west, it is partly luck.
Eastern Europe was generally faster to adopt tough measures, says Thomas Hale, a political scientist at
Oxford who helped assemble an index of the stringency of covid-19 responses. But that could be partly
because the virus got there later, and Italy served as a warning. Meanwhile, citizens of Europe’s high-trust
countries have had it relatively easy. Germany has had little confrontational policing. The Netherlands
implemented what it terms an “intelligent lockdown”, closing schools and restaurants but allowing
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socialising with up to three visitors. There are no limits on circulating outdoors other than staying 1.5
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metres apart. Mark Rutte, the prime minister, says people are “treated as adults, not as children”. As for
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Sweden, it has no lockdown at all. Schools and restaurants are open, though citizens are advised to avoid
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non-essential travel. “We use the phrase ‘freedom under responsibility’,” says Lars Tragardh, a Swedish
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historian. On Mr Hale’s index Sweden and Germany were the only EU countries that never reached
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maximum stringency. The Swedes and Dutch are following government recommendations: mobility is down
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by about 40%, according to Google data. But in France and Italy it is down about 80%. Worryingly, Dutch
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and Swedish covid-19 mortality rates outstrip those in neighbouring countries. The Dutch death rate per
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head is almost four times that in Germany. Sweden’s is double that in Denmark, which has a tight lockdown.
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This suggests that during epidemics trust is a double-edged sword. High-trust countries will probably do
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better economically, as they usually do. But in public-health terms, high trust may have lulled Dutch and
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Swedes into a false sense of security. For now, most are satisfied with their governments’ responses. But
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so are most Romanians. Perhaps that will help to close Europe’s trust gap.
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The shortcomings of Mr Macron’s martial posture, however, soon became clear. France, like everywhere
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else, cannot “defeat” covid-19. The exit from lockdown, déconfinement, which will start in France on May
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11th, is not a battle. It is a complex process of balancing trade-offs, managing fears and securing trust—all
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in the face of shifting evidence and imperfect information. Hence the president’s more recent adoption of
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a Minervan cloak of sagesse. In his third televised address from the Elysée palace, on April 13th, there was
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plenty about solidarité and fraternité to stir the spirit. But Mr Macron was also a model of humility. “We
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should be honest,” he said, citing “mistakes” and “failures” over shortages of masks, gowns and hand gel.
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It was time, he concluded mysteriously, for “reinvention, of myself first of all”. Faced with so many
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unknowns, the philosopher-president seems to have ditched public lectures for self-analysis and a hyper-
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detailed fact-finding mission: quizzing supermarket cashiers one day; flying, bizarrely, to Marseille to
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question a microbiologist on the use of hydroxychloroquine the other. “This moment”, he told Le Point, a
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magazine, “has shaken a lot of things in me.” Like the owl of Minerva, a favourite reference of his, Mr
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Macron seems to be waiting for the pandemic’s dusk before seeking fully to understand. Class action suit
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The president’s new look is more suited to the uncertain times. Covid-19 has offered a form of revenge to
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the rational-minded technocratic leader after the populist years. Mrs Merkel’s approval rating has soared;
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Mr Macron’s has jumped, though less high. Yet it would be rash to draw too many conclusions. For one
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thing, the political aftermath of the pandemic will be brutal, with claim and counterclaim about who took
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the right or wrong decision when. Many in France feel that they have been deeply misled over the use of
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masks and tests. Only 39% say that they trust the government to deal with covid-19. Marine Le Pen and her
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populist friends may be quiet for now. But nobody doubts that she will be back. The other point is that, as
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a political quality, humility has its limits. Pragmatism can often be made to look like hesitation; adaptation
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mere improvisation. Ultimately, even the most fact-guided politician can defer only so much to scientists
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and experts. Decisions in the end are for them to take. After three years in office, Mr Macron knows this
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well. Which is why the wisest guise of all may also be the hardest: to sound humble, and act smart.
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7
- Extrait à lʼemplacement 894 | Ajouté le samedi 2 mai 2020 09:22:50
SAUDI ARABIA No more flogging But the beheadings continue 375 words “THE FORNICATRESS and the
fornicator—flog each of them with a hundred stripes; and do not let pity for them hold you back from
carrying out God’s law.” So says the Koran, which dates back to the seventh century. Prince Muhammad
bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is trying to drag the kingdom into the 21st. So on April 25th
the government banned flogging as a punishment, to the relief of blasphemers, adulterers and liberals. A
day later it said it would stop executing people for crimes committed when they were children. This is
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merely Prince Muhammad’s latest push to modernise. Since his elderly father, Salman, became king in
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2015, the crown prince has curbed the morality police, allowed women to drive and lifted a ban on cinemas.
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The public is pleased; clerics, not so much. The new decrees challenge the clerics in an area where they
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may be reluctant to take orders: the implementation of sharia (Islamic law). Since the kingdom was founded
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in 1932 they have administered justice based on their knowledge of scripture. Prince Muhammad, though,
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is mulling a plan to codify penal law. Eventually he may even allow the appointment of judges who consider
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a woman’s testimony equal to that of a man, instead of worth half as much, as is currently the case. Some
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clerics are quietly calling the prince an enemy of Islam. Liberals may cheer, but Prince Muhammad is
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concentrating ever more power in his own hands—and compassion is not his strong suit. He has thrown
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thousands of people into jail, including an uncle and a cousin (a potential rival for the throne), as well as
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campaigners for democracy and women’s rights. Minors may be spared, but the rate of executions has
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doubled on the prince’s watch. The kingdom set a record last year with 184. (The number of extrajudicial
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killings is unknown.) Capital punishment is falling out of favour in much of the world, but not in the Middle
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East. Last year Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia carried out over 80% of all executions outside China, says Amnesty
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International, a watchdog. Executions in Iraq increased by 92%. In Saudi Arabia, convicts will no longer be
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sentenced to flogging, but some are still beheaded with a sword.

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Covid-19 hurts emerging economies in at least three ways: by locking down their populations, damaging
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their export earnings and deterring foreign capital. Even if the pandemic fades in the second half of the
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year, GDP in developing countries, measured at purchasing-power parity, will be 6.6% smaller in 2020 than
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the IMF had forecast in October. The damage to exports will be acute. Thanks to low oil prices, Gulf oil
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exporters will suffer a current-account deficit of over 3% of GDP this year, the IMF reckons, compared with
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a 5.6% surplus last year. When exports fall short of imports, countries typically bridge the gap by borrowing
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from abroad. But the reversal of capital inflows has been matched by higher borrowing costs. In March the
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risk premium that emerging markets must pay buyers of their dollar bonds rose to distressed levels (over
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ten percentage points) for nearly 20 governments—a record number, says the IMF. To weather the crisis,
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emerging economies may need at least $2.5trn, the fund reckons, from foreign sources or their own
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reserves. One way to ensure countries have more hard currency is to stop taking it from them. The G20
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group of governments has said it will refrain from collecting payments this year on its loans to the poorest
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77 countries (though the borrowers will have to make up the difference later). The G7 group of countries
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has urged private lenders to show forbearance too.

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FREE EXCHANGE
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Mountain to climb
Why America’s unemployed could face a lost decade
1008 words THE FIGURES are staggering, even to those hardened by the experience of the global financial
crisis. Disney will furlough 100,000 of its hotel and theme-park workers. Uber may slash its staff by a fifth.
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Fully 26m new claims for unemployment insurance have been filed in America since late March. By April
18th more than a tenth of participants in the labour force were receiving unemployment benefits, the
highest rate on record. In March alone American firms shed more than 700,000 jobs, on net. Another 2m
may have gone in April, a drop rivalling the record decline in employment that occurred in 1945, as
America’s armed forces demobilised. Covid-19 has spread large-scale economic disruption around the
world. It is increasingly clear that the pandemic confronts America with a labour-market crisis not seen
since the Great Depression of the 1930s. How severe will the crisis be? America’s unemployment rate rose
to around 10% after the global financial crisis and to 25% during the Depression. Recent forecasts, though
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beset by uncertainty, put the probable peak rate in 2020 somewhere between those figures. Modelling
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based on recent filings for benefits suggests that the unemployment rate in mid-April may have been
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around 16%, according to Ernie Tedeschi of Evercore ISI, a consultancy. An analysis of the macroeconomic
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effects of the coronavirus published on April 24th by America’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) paints a
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similar, sobering picture. The CBO reckons that unemployment will rise to 14% in the second quarter of this
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year, and peak in the third quarter at around 16%. The rate would be even higher, but for the 8m workers
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it assumes will become discouraged and leave the workforce (in order to count as unemployed, people
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must participate in the labour market by actively seeking work). Some places and groups will fare worse
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than others. During the financial crisis, peak unemployment rates across states ranged from just over 4%
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to nearly 15%. The peak rate for black Americans, at 16.8%, was nearly twice that for whites. The heights
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that unemployment reaches will depend on the depths that economic activity plumbs. There is no question
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that the drop in output through the first half of 2020 will be staggering. Figures published on April 29th
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showed that GDP fell by 1.2% in the first quarter, compared with the final quarter of 2019 (an annualised
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rate of -4.8%). The CBO projects that output will fall by about 12% between the first quarter and the second,
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or an annualised pace of roughly -40% (see chart, middle panel). But the economic and social pain of
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unemployment rests largely on how persistent the weakness in the labour market proves to be, which in
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turn depends on the pace of the economic recovery. The CBO, like many forecasters, expects America’s
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economy to begin growing again in the second half of the year, as restrictive measures are relaxed. They
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forecast, perhaps optimistically, a robust rate of growth in the third quarter of 5.4% (an annualised rate of
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23.5%). A fast initial rebound might well materialise as sectors shut down by pandemic-fighting measures
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begin to re-open. But growth is expected to moderate thereafter to an annual rate of 2.8% in 2021, in line
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with America’s recent pre-pandemic performance. If the past relationship between output and job growth
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is a guide, such a rate will be sufficient only to reduce unemployment to 9.5% by the year’s end. In other
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words, some 20 months from now, unemployment may still be close to the peak reached in the aftermath
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of the financial crisis. If GDP growth continued at 2.8% thereafter, America would regain its pre-pandemic
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unemployment rate only in 2026. As dire as the CBO’s projections are, it is difficult to see how the economy
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could do better. The forecast drop in the unemployment rate from the third quarter to the fourth, of 4.3
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percentage points, would, if realised, easily be the fastest ever three-month decline. It would achieve in
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three months what took a year during the early 1940s, when America mobilised for war. In the absence of
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a miracle treatment or early vaccine, it is the very best America can hope for. Far easier to imagine are ways
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in which the forecast disappoints. New outbreaks or restrictions on activity could push output lower and
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delay a turnaround in the jobs market. Though economic recoveries from the 1950s to the 1980s were
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often V-shaped, recent business cycles have proven more lopsided. Dramatic declines in output and
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employment have not been followed by correspondingly steep rebounds. Deep trouble Many of the factors
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implicated in this change in recovery patterns are likely to apply as the pandemic recedes. Easing could
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prove insufficient. Though America’s spending on stimulus has been impressive so far, there are some signs
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of fiscal fatigue. The Federal Reserve has largely succeeded in averting financial-market havoc, but its ability
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to revive economic growth may be hampered by near-zero interest rates. Household and company debt,
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already high before the pandemic compared with the early post-war era, will grow more burdensome as
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the economy shrinks, reducing the scope for new spending once the recovery gets under way. Firms may
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come to view the pandemic as an opportunity to streamline production—through the use of remote-work
and automating technologies, for example—potentially reducing labour demand down the road. Research
by Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia finds that
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such structural shifts during downturns have contributed to the joblessness of recent recoveries. Even in
the rosiest of scenarios, the outlook for those without a job seems grim. Were unemployment to fall as
quickly as it did from 1933 to 1937, a return to pre-pandemic jobless rates would still take half a decade.
At the rate of improvement experienced after the financial crisis, by contrast, full recovery could take two
decades. All that after the hardship of the 2010s seems nearly unthinkable. Yet without a hefty dose of
good luck and an aggressive government effort, America’s unemployed face a real risk of another lost
decade—or two. ■
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COVID-19 AND SMOKING An unexpected ally Smokers seem less likely than non-smokers to fall ill with
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covid-19 631 words A QUARTER OF French adults smoke. Many people were surprised, therefore, when
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researchers reported late in April that only 5% of 482 covid-19 patients who came to the Pitié-Salpêtrière
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hospital in Paris between February 28th and April 9th were daily smokers. The ratios of smokers to non-
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smokers in earlier tallies at hospitals in America, China and elsewhere in France varied. But all revealed
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habitual smokers to be significantly underrepresented among those requiring hospital treatment for the
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illness. Smokers, the authors of the report wrote, “are much less likely” to suffer severely from SARS-CoV-
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2, the virus that causes covid-19. Rarely, they added, is such a result seen in medicine. Smokers are almost
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certainly not protected from initial infection by SARS-CoV-2. In fact, because they first handle and then puff
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on cigarettes, they may be especially susceptible—for transmission often takes place through the mouth’s
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mucous membranes. What seems to be happening is that infected smokers are less likely to develop
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symptoms, or, if they do develop them, are more likely than non-smokers to have symptoms which are
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mild. That means they are more likely to stay home and not to show up in hospital statistics. All this suggests
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that something in tobacco smoke is having a protective effect. The best guess is that the something in
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question is nicotine. News of this hypothesis has spread like wildfire. To stop a run on nicotine chemically
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extracted from tobacco, which is taken in one form or another by many smokers who are trying to quit the
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habit, France’s health ministry suspended online sales of the substance on April 24th. Purchases from
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pharmacies were limited to a month’s supply per person. With encouragement from the health minister,
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the organisations behind the Pitié-Salpêtrière study, which include the Pasteur Institute and the Sorbonne,
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are preparing trials. The plan is to offer nicotine patches to covid-19 patients, front-line workers and
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ordinary citizens. How they fare will be compared with control groups given a placebo. Nicotine is not
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thought to attack SARS-CoV-2 directly. It may, however, play an indirect role that involves a cell-membrane
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protein called ACE2, to which the virus attaches itself in order to gain access to a cell. Some researchers
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suspect that nicotine binds to ACE2 as well, and that this makes it harder for the virus to do so alongside it.
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Nicotine may also soothe inflammation caused by the infection, a hypothesis supported by its use to treat
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inflamed bowels. The new French study, which is expected to begin in three weeks’ time, may cast light,
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too, on another possible therapeutic effect of nicotine. Those severely ill with covid-19 are often the victims
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of a hyperactive immune response called a cytokine storm. Cytokines are a group of signalling molecules.
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Some have the job of recruiting pathogen-fighting white blood cells to a site of infection. If too many of
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these cells arrive at once they can end up attacking the body’s own tissues. Jason Sheltzer, a molecular
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biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in New York state, who is investigating the matter, reckons it
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possible that nicotine, which interferes with this process, may lessen the damage. Anti-smoking
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campaigners have been eager to point out that none of this is a recommendation to take up smoking. If a
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few lucky smokers have thus evaded the worst effects of covid-19, it can hardly be said that their actions
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were part of some well-thought-out plan. That is not, however, an excuse for pretending observations like
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those from the Pitié-Salpêtrière are irrelevant, and thus failing to follow them up. If either nicotine or some
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other chemical found in tobacco smoke leads to a treatment, the rest of humanity may be thankful for the
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world’s smokers having made themselves accidental guinea pigs in a giant epidemiological experiment.■
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10
ME TIME
All the lonely people
As millions are discovering, solitude has always been both a blessing and a curse
1945 words A Biography of Loneliness. By Fay Bound Alberti. Oxford University Press; 320 pages; $25.95
and £20 A History of Solitude. By David Vincent. Polity; 304 pages; $35 and £25 IN HIS “POLITICS” Aristotle
argued that, thanks to the gift of language, man is destined to be a social and therefore a political animal.
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Yet the human instinct to socialise has always been balanced by an urge to withdraw into solitude. A few
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hermits make their lives in isolation, but many ordinary folk believe society is only tolerable if punctuated
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by frequent spells on their own. “There are many modern thinkers who emphasise the individual’s
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dependency upon society,” John Cowper Powys, a British writer and advocate of solitude, observed. “It is,
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on the contrary, only the cultivation of interior solitude, among crowded lives, that makes society
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endurable.” Historians are for the most part solitary creatures themselves—the sort of people who, at
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school, preferred reading to team sports and, as adults, desperately try to avoid committees in order to
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spend more time in the library. All the same, they generally focus on gregarious activities, whether
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politicians on manoeuvres or the masses on the march. Bucking that trend, a couple of fascinating books
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on social isolation have appeared in time for the lockdown. Fay Bound Alberti has tried her hand at a history
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of loneliness. David Vincent focuses on loneliness’s rather more interesting sibling, solitude. Both
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concentrate on late modern Britain, Ms Alberti because she argues, somewhat unpersuasively, that
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loneliness is a recent phenomenon, the product of industrialisation and secularisation; Mr Vincent because
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he has spent a lifetime studying the country’s modern social history. What Aristotle called the “bird which
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flies alone” is finally getting his due. Medieval Christendom saw some extraordinary feats of solitude. In the
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late third century St Anthony spent years in the desert with only scorpions and beasts for company. St
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Jerome tried a similar feat but took a large library with him. St Simeon Stylites upped the ante by sitting on
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top of a pillar in order to be closer to heaven. (“The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it
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could not disturb, this celestial life,” Edward Gibbon wrote in a wonderful description of the saint, “and the
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patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.”) Monasteries were refuges from the world
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that combined communal living with hours of solo prayer. Thomas Merton, a modern advocate of
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monasticism, claimed that “man’s loneliness is in fact the loneliness of God.” The 18th and 19th centuries
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saw this cult of solitude reinvented in secular forms. Enlightenment philosophers argued that the key to a
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civilised life lay in mixing sociability and solitude in just the right doses: immerse yourself too deeply in
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urban life and you might become neurotic, but retreat for too long to the country and you might degenerate
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into a bearded barbarian. The Romantics thought the best way to create great art was to surround yourself
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with nature. John Clare began one poem: “O thou soothing Solitude/From the vain and from the rude”.
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William Wordsworth wandered “lonely as a cloud”. By taking long walks in remote places, such as the Lake
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District or the Alps, you could become what Robert Louis Stevenson later called “a pipe for any wind to play
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upon”. The Romantics set off a lasting fashion for grappling with nature in the raw. In Britain intellectuals
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showed that scaling mountains and hiking long distances could connote brains as well as brawn (Leslie
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Stephen and G.M. Trevelyan thought nothing of walking from Cambridge to London for dinner). In America
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the march of civilisation generated a compensatory fascination with the wilderness. Henry David Thoreau
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retreated to Walden Pond. As a young man Teddy Roosevelt reinvented himself as a western cowboy by
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travelling around the Dakotas. As president he created National Parks to let ordinary Americans escape
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from the pressure of civilisation to a natural world of soaring peaks and wild animals. Many of the iconic
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images of 19th-century America capture a sense of solitude—the “lonesome cowboy” on cattle drives or
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the haunting sound of the train whistle in the middle of nowhere. Lost in the crowd As Mr Vincent says,
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industrial society brought a spate of solitary hobbies within reach by boosting living standards and enlarging
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personal space. Women with a little time on their hands took up pastimes that had once been necessities,
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such as cooking, dressmaking and embroidery. Men tried pigeon-breeding and stamp-collecting. People of
both sexes took on jigsaw puzzles and, from the 1920s, crosswords. The cult of solitude also encouraged
less healthy habits. Charles Kingsley, a subscriber to “muscular Christianity”, regarded tobacco as the ideal
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accompaniment to the solitary life—“a lone man’s companion, a bachelor’s friend, a hungry man’s food, a
sad man’s cordial, a wakeful man’s sleep, and a chilly man’s fire”. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
preferred an opium pipe to ignite his solitary reveries. Healthy or otherwise, these hobbies united a nation
that was divided by class. Britain’s allotment movement meant that, by 1910, half a million working-class
men could enjoy the pleasures of gardening. Such activities also married sociability with solitude. Smokers
shared their solitary vice in dedicated rooms in clubs and pubs. Angling encouraged people to collaborate
on being alone. “We may club together as against others, but by the water we divide,” Morley Roberts
wrote in 1932. “When I fish I am the universe.” Yet the more civilisation has advanced, the further people
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have had to go to achieve that sensation. Starting with Joshua Slocum in 1895, solo yachtsmen sailed
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around the world, sometimes cutting themselves off from all outside help. Robin Knox-Johnston, for
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example, didn’t talk to anyone for five months. Mountaineers competed with each other to slip the knot of
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civilisation. In 2017 Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in Yosemite with neither companions nor crampons.
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These extraordinary battles against nature were inspired by the belief that the best way to explore body
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and soul is to strip the self to its essence. “It is here, in the immense desert of the Southern Ocean,” Bernard
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Moitessier wrote, “that I feel most strongly how much man is both atom and god.” And the more
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sophisticated civilisation has become, the more people have been willing to use its fruits to escape the
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enforced sociability that has mostly been humanity’s lot. In 1900 just 5% of households comprised one
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person. Today a quarter do in America, along with a third in Britain and perhaps half in Sweden. Sometimes
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the solo life is a choice: people use their money to dump an unsatisfactory partner. Sometimes it is a
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tragedy: in Britain a million older people say they routinely suffer from loneliness. Most feel unable to admit
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their plight to friends and relatives. This points to the paradox at the heart of solitude, which, as Mr Vincent
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says, can be both a blessing and a curse. Loneliness and solitude are not the same: you can feel lonely in a
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crowd—indeed loneliness is at its darkest when you are surrounded by people having fun—but they
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overlap. Unwanted solitude can lead to the most miserable sort of loneliness. “I’d like to meet,” C.S. Lewis
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wrote to a friend after his wife died, “for I am—Oh God that I were not—very free now. One doesn’t realise
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in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy is to be tied.” Even voluntary solitude can
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foster mental illness. In the early modern period John Evelyn warned that solitude “creates witches”.
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Samuel-Auguste Tissot feared it led to masturbation and all that masturbation entails, “melancholy, sighing,
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tears, palpitations, suffocations and faintings”. The first great book devoted to solitude, by George III’s
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personal doctor, Johann Georg Zimmerman, was titled “Solitude Considered with Respect to its Dangerous
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Influence Upon the Mind and Heart” (1791). Joseph Conrad condemns his character Nostromo to die of
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solitude, “the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand”.
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Given its power to break the spirit, loneliness has inevitably been used as a punishment. Pentonville,
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Britain’s first model prison built on Utilitarian principles, confined all prisoners in solitary cells, though it
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dropped the face masks that, in Jeremy Bentham’s original design, they were supposed to wear to stop
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them communicating during meals. The most extreme use of solitary confinement was in a wing of a state
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prison in Auburn, New York, where inmates were confined in total solitude, with no exercise and no human
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contact of any kind. Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville were appalled when they visited the
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place in 1833: “In order to reform them they have been submitted to complete isolation; but this absolute
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solitude, if nothing interrupt it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission
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and without pity; it does not reform, it kills.” Ms Alberti notes that anxiety over involuntary loneliness has
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become a big political issue, particularly in northern European and Anglo-Saxon countries, where the
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breakdown of the family has gone furthest. In 2016 the BBC released a television documentary on “the age
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of loneliness”. In 2017 Vivek Murthy, America’s former surgeon general, declared an “epidemic of
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loneliness”. In 2018 Theresa May appointed Britain’s first “minister for loneliness”, declaring that “up to a
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fifth of UK adults feel lonely most or all of the time.” Life in the quiet carriage The history of solitude is thus
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partly a history of extremes—of people who have willingly sat on top of pillars for decades and of prison
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reformers who aim to use loneliness to break men’s souls. But it is also a history of the quest for balance.
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The healthiest form of solitude is a flexible kind that combines it with sociability as necessary. Modern
technology has made it both easier and harder to get the balance right. On the one hand, it has introduced
what Mr Vincent calls “networked solitude”. Just as St Jerome squatted in his cave surrounded by his library,
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so modern hermits can sit in their flats gorging on downloaded books and films or chatting with friends
across the world. On the other hand, it has made it more difficult to enjoy the benefits of solitude.
Distraction is always one click away. And the same technology that allows the solitary individual to engage
remotely with society also allows society to engage remotely—and sometimes secretly—with the
individual. Giant companies watch over you whether you are alone or in a crowd. There is also something
disturbing about the way the boundaries between solitude and sociability are blurring. Visit a gym and you
see sweaty solipsists performing private workouts in public. On a train many of your fellow passengers will
be insulated by headphones. Those ubiquitous devices are double-edged: they can fill your head with
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babble or, thanks to noise-cancelling, leave you in Trappist silence. As the two categories mingle, so the
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quest for balance becomes more intense. Popular modern fads offer a reacquaintance with the virtues of
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solitude: mindfulness provides access to peace and silence; some of the most popular pastimes in Silicon
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Valley, the source of so much noise and distraction, are hiking, yoga and meditation. The lockdown has put
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the question of solitude at the heart of politics. Social distancing has been a tragedy for those living and, in
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some cases, dying alone. But for others it has proved a strange blessing. Overworked people have been
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able to take a break from the treadmill of commuting. Many have picked up long-abandoned hobbies, such
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as tending the garden or playing bridge. Solitude is both one of mankind’s greatest blessings and greatest
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curses—and thanks to a virus that has been carried across the world by human sociability, more people
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than ever are getting the chance to experience both. ■
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EDUCATION : The purpose of classics Studying the languages of long ago is an education in the truest
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sense 764 words WHY STUDY classical languages?

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For a long time the reason was clear: there wasn’t much else to read. Medieval Europe read and wrote in
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Latin, even as its spoken form had changed so much it had become early French and Spanish. During the
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Renaissance the rediscovery of Greek made it essential for the cultured to know it too. From there,
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“classics” had momentum: even as people started writing in their vernaculars, they still learned Latin and
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Greek, until those languages became a mark of education itself. And since education was limited to the
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upper classes and clergy, they became synonymous with power. In Britain, the classics carry the cachet of
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the posh schools where they have predominantly been taught. Boris Johnson, the latest Old Etonian prime
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minister, enjoys showing off with snatches of Greek. Since overt snobbery has fallen from fashion, though,
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proponents of the classics have updated their case. Classical languages are good training for the mind, many
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now argue. Latin and Greek, with their panoply of case-endings, force readers and students to pay attention
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to the grammatical function of every word in a sentence, incidentally improving their English grammar as
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well. But is learning Latin or Greek really the best way to achieve that goal? To learn cases you could choose
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a living language such as Russian or German. The best way to learn English grammar is by studying English
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grammar. Nicola Gardini, a professor of literature at Oxford, has no time for the “trains your mind”
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argument for Latin; the subtitle of his book “Long Live Latin”, published last year, is “The Pleasures of a
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Useless Language”. The subject, he insists, is not a “cognitive boot camp”. A glorious civilisation was built
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on the back of Latin. True, Rome’s great works can be read in translation, and discovering them in the
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original takes effort. But, says Mr Gardini, that lets you “enter the world of the ancients, the very opposite
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of the desire to haul them into the present age”. Mary Norris’s father was a fireman, and not taken by the
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practical arguments for Latin, either; he refused to let his daughter learn it. Instead, Ms Norris, today the
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chief copy editor for the New Yorker, fell in love with Greek, and last year published her own love-letter to
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it, “Greek to Me”. If Mr Gardini’s book is about a passion for a language and its authors, hers celebrates
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Greek culture more broadly, with lashings of ouzo and island-hopping. She has studied both the ancient
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and the modern tongue, experiencing an unexpected attraction to her female teacher. Greek, she
concludes, is “sexy”, especially for someone with her logophilic cast of mind. Since ancient Greek has given
so many rarefied words to English, Ms Norris gets a small thrill from being asked “dipsas?” (“Are you
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thirsty?”) The root that shows up in the English “dipsomaniac” is everyday Greek. Coulter George’s new
book, “How Dead Languages Work”, is a reminder that Greek and Latin are hardly the only classical
languages. A linguist at the University of Virginia, he devotes chapters to Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit,
Old Irish and Hebrew. All but Hebrew belong to the Indo-European family, as does English, and Mr George
delights in drawing links between them. But he also revels in the quirks that make each unique: Latin’s
ablative absolutes (like mutatis mutandis), Old English’s poetic compounds (like banhus, “bonehouse”,
meaning the body), or the rules of “sandhi”, by which Sanskrit words change their sounds based on those
adjacent to them. If you are up for a mighty challenge, Old Irish makes Latin look like a lazy stroll. That
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Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and such are highly complicated, dripping with grammatical endings in particular, may
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suggest such languages forced people to develop a greater rigour of thought. It shouldn’t. All languages are
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easy for their speakers. Nor were all ancient languages heavily inflected like Greek or Sanskrit. Classical
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Chinese is virtually the opposite of a language such as Latin—it is almost entirely monosyllabic and lacks
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rigid distinctions between parts of speech. Instead of making it easy, this merely presents different
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challenges. Mr Gardini gives another reason for studying classical languages: “The story of our lives is just
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a fraction of all history…life began long before we were born.” This is the very opposite of a practical
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argument—it is a meditative, even self-effacing one. To learn a language because it was spoken by some
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brilliant people 2,000 years ago is to celebrate the world; not a way to optimise yourself, but to get over
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yourself.
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COVID-19 AND LIFE EXPECTANCY Before their time A new study suggests that covid-19 robs people of years
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of life 586 words “SACRIFICE THE WEAK”, urged a sign at a protest against Tennessee’s lockdown on April
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20th—though whether the person holding it was trolling the other protesters is unknown. Some claim social
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distancing is pointless, since covid-19’s elderly victims would soon have died of other causes. In Britain
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many pundits have said that two-thirds of the country’s dead were already within a year of passing away.
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They cite an estimate made in March by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London who
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advises the government. Mr Ferguson notes that two-thirds was the upper bound of his estimate, and that
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the real fraction could be much lower. He says it is “very hard” to measure how ill covid-19’s victims were
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before catching it, and how long they might have lived otherwise. However, a study by researchers from a
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group of Scottish universities has attempted to do so. They found that the years of life lost (YLLs) for the
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average Briton or Italian who passed away was probably around 11, meaning that few of covid-19’s victims
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would have died soon otherwise. First the authors analysed data for 6,801 Italian victims, grouped by age
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and sex for confidentiality. About 40% of men were older than 80, as were 60% of women. (The virus has
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killed fewer women than men, perhaps because they have different immune responses.) The authors
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excluded the 1% of victims under 50. Then they calculated how much longer these cohorts would normally
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survive. Life expectancies for old people are surprisingly high, even when they have underlying conditions,
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because many of the unhealthiest have already passed away. For example, an average Italian 80-year-old
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will reach 90. The YLLs from this method were 11.5 for Italian men and 10.9 for women. Then the authors
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accounted for other illnesses the victims had, in case they were unusually frail for their age. For 710 Italians,
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they could see how many had a specific long-term condition, such as hypertension or cancer. The authors
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used a smaller Scottish sample to estimate how often each combination of diseases occurs among covid-
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19 victims. Finally, they analysed data for 850,000 Welsh people, to predict how long somebody with a
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given age and set of conditions would normally live. Strikingly, the study shows that in this hybrid European
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model, people killed by covid-19 had only slightly higher rates of underlying illness than everyone else their
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age. When the authors adjusted for pre-existing conditions and then simulated deaths using normal Italian
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life expectancies, the YLLs dropped just a little, to 11.1 for men and 10.2 for women. (They were slightly
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lower for Britons.) Fully 20% of the dead were reasonably healthy people in their 50s and 60s, who were
expected to live for another 25 years on average. The researchers warn that their data exclude people who
died in care homes, who might have been especially sickly. Nor can they account for the severity of
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underlying illnesses. For example, covid-19 victims might have had particularly acute lung or heart
conditions. More complete data could produce a lower estimate of YLLs. Mr Ferguson also points out that
tallies of all-cause mortality will contain clues. If the pandemic has merely hastened imminent deaths, there
should be fewer than usual once covid-19 is under control. Still, the available evidence suggests that many
covid-19 victims were far from death’s door previously, and cut down at least a decade before their time.
Allowing the virus to spread freely would sacrifice the strong as well as the weak. ■
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The slump will hurt smaller firms and leave the bigger corporate survivors in a stronger position, increasing
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the concentration of some industries that was already a problem before the pandemic. A crisis demands
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sacrifice and will leave behind a big bill. The clamour for payback will only grow louder if big business has
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hogged more than its share of the subsidies on offer.
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AMERICA AND CHINA The new scold war A relationship long burdened by rivalry and suspicion has fallen
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into outright hostility 634 words YOU MIGHT have hoped that a pandemic would bring the world together.
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Instead covid-19 is tearing it apart. As the disease has spread, relations between America and China have
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plunged into an abyss from which they will struggle to escape. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, says
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he has “enormous evidence” that the virus behind covid-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan—though
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America’s intelligence agencies as well as its closest intelligence partners say proof is still lacking. To punish
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China for letting the disease spread, the Trump administration has reportedly considered demanding
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reparations or cancelling some Treasury bonds held by China—though nervous American officials later
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dismissed this crackpot idea. China has branded Mr Pompeo “insane” and a “political virus” (see United
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States section). State-run media are calling for an international investigation into America’s “incredible
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failure” to deal with the outbreak. This sniping deepens a bitter rivalry. The dominant view in the United
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States is that China is fundamentally hostile, a strategic rival that steals American intellectual property and
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destroys American jobs in the race to get ahead. China, meanwhile, sees America as a decadent and
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declining power that has resorted to bullying to keep China down because it can no longer compete fairly.
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Domestic politics in both countries is likely to intensify the animosity. Now that covid-19 has undone the
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economic gains that occurred on his watch, President Donald Trump is making confrontation with China
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central to his re-election strategy including, he hopes, as a way to browbeat his opponent, Joe Biden. China
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denies any blame for the pandemic, instead hailing the party’s disease management. At home, propaganda
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outlets hint that the virus came from America—and are widely believed. Yet America’s complaint that
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China’s first instinct was to cover up covid-19 is true. Other countries, including Australia, have called for
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an investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Reuters news agency this week reported on an internal
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paper prepared for China’s leaders, warning that feelings around the world against their country, led by
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America, are more intense than at any time since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989. China will
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slap down foreign critics more vigorously than ever. Tension between two such splenetic powers has
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consequences. One is the risk of military action. China has occupied and fortified disputed shoals and reefs
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in the South China Sea in defiance of international law. It has recently sunk a Vietnamese vessel there.
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America, meanwhile, has been vigorously asserting the principle of freedom of navigation. When tensions
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are high, so are the risks of an accident. The most dangerous flashpoint is Taiwan. China claims the island
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as its own territory; America has an implicit commitment to protect it. During the pandemic, China has been
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testing Taiwan’s defences with aerial sorties and, in March, its first night-time exercise. America may be
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thinking of sending a high-ranking official to visit. Neither China nor America seeks war, surely. But they are
deliberately hurtling towards an economic separation. The world is thick with talk that more industries
should count as strategic. As our special report on banking this week spells out, China is building a parallel
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financial system that will avoid the dollar-based payment mechanisms—and hence American sanctions. A
trade deal between America and China, a minor, pre-covid thawing in their commercial rivalry, may yet fall
apart. Animosity also makes global threats, such as climate change and international crime, harder to deal
with. Consider the pandemic itself. This week the European Union held a conference that raised $8bn to
finance the search for a vaccine which might save lives and let people go back to work without fear. But
America stayed away and China sent an empty-handed ambassador. For those decisions to make sense in
Washington and Beijing, something must have gone very wrong. ■
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SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING High-speed science The pandemic has caused scientists to work faster. That
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should be welcomed
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590 words IT IS A testament to the machinery of science that so much has been learned about covid-19 so
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rapidly. Since January the number of publications has been doubling every 14 days, reaching 1,363 in the
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past week alone. They have covered everything from the genetics of the virus that causes the disease to
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computer models of its spread and the scope for vaccines and treatments. What explains the speed? Much
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as in other areas of life, covid-19 has burnt away encrusted traditions. Scientific journals have done their
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best to assess and publish research in days rather than their customary months or years. But a bigger factor
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behind the breakneck pace of publication is the willingness of biomedical scientists to bypass journals
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altogether and share their work quickly in the form of preprints—research manuscripts that are posted
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freely online and which have not been peer-reviewed. Preprints are not a new idea. They have been an
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important method of communication in physical sciences and mathematics for decades. Biologists and
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medical scientists, however, have long resisted them. Unlike number theory or astrophysics, biologists have
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argued, their findings often directly affect individuals and companies (see Science section). Incomplete or
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unchecked studies could do them harm. Arguments against preprints sound reasonable. Unless you are an
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expert in the field, it is hard to know whether a preprinted study is any good. Without peer-review before
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posting, the risk of shoddy science may well rise. The research contained in freely available preprints could
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be misinterpreted or abused by those hunting for scientific cover for their actions. The evidence, however,
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suggests such worries are overdone. A recent study found that an impressive 67% of the preprints posted
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on the bioRxiv server before 2017 were eventually picked up and published in scientific journals. A separate
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study showed that the difference in scientific value, as measured by other researchers, between a preprint
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and the final version of the same study in a journal was, on average, less than 5%. Preprints do not avoid
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peer-review; it just happens after publication (informally and often in public) instead of beforehand
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(organised by editors and mostly in secret). Manuscripts attract the scrutiny of independent experts, who
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relish tearing apart bad work. Dissent is easily visible next to the original preprint or just a link away. Authors
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can update their manuscripts as comments come in or even withdraw them if they conclude they have big
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flaws. With traditional scientific journals retractions can take months or years, if they happen at all. In the
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long run, exposing the messy, argumentative guts of the scientific process could bolster public trust in
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science itself. Researchers do not follow a straight road to the truth. Rather, they meander, disagree and
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fumble towards an understanding of the world. In this way all findings are provisional, standing only until
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later work modifies or overturns them. Preprints are not perfect. As they grow more common, there may
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be unpleasant side-effects. If the recent history of other social media is a guide, some people will find ways
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to game preprint servers and spread disinformation through them. Hosts and users of preprints should
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prepare for that. To get the most out of them, non-expert users need to step up their scepticism. Policy or
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journalism based on their contents should identify the source and its limitations. As the deluge of work on
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covid-19 has shown, fast, free-flowing scientific information is vital for progress. The virus has changed the
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way scientists do their work and talk to each other, we hope for good.■
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CARE-HOME COVID DEATHS Getting to the truth Governments have been slow to acknowledge a grim
problem 719 words PARIS AT A CARE home high in the hills above Cannes, on the French Riviera, the first
report at the end of March was of 12 deaths. A week later, the toll had surged to 24. The town’s undertaker
was overwhelmed. Families began to panic. By April 30th, 38 of the original 109 residents at the care home
were dead, from confirmed or suspected covid-19. In care homes across France 9,471 deaths had been
recorded by May 5th—nearly two-fifths of the country’s official covid-19 death toll. This grim situation
became apparent in France when it started publishing statistics for care-home deaths on April 1st. Britain,
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which began to do this four weeks later, is only now uncovering a similar calamity. When it first added care-
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home casualties, the official death toll jumped by almost 4,000 in a day. On May 5th the total in Britain, at
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29,427, overtook Italy’s tally (which does not yet include them) to become Europe’s highest. How many
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sinister, underreported aspects of the covid-19 outbreak might yet emerge in Europe? Due to reporting
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lags and varying death-certification procedures, all official data tend to undercount covid deaths. The best
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way to get a more accurate picture is to look at excess mortality, the gap between the number of overall
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recorded deaths and the historic average for the same period. The Economist has calculated excess
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mortality for some of Europe’s worst-hit countries, using, where possible, a five-year average (see chart).
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We also use this to calculate how well different countries are capturing the effect of covid-19 in their official
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data. France, Sweden and Belgium seem to do the best job. (German numbers are not recent enough to
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make valid comparisons, and may be exaggerated by unusually low flu-related deaths earlier this year.)
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Their official covid-19 death tolls are picking up 87-93% of excess mortality. This partly reflects reporting
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protocols. Belgium includes suspected as well as confirmed covid-19 deaths. Indeed, three-quarters of
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covid-19-related deaths in its care homes have not actually been tested, according to Yves Coppieters, an
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epidemiologist at the Free University of Brussels. This gives tiny Belgium a big total relative to its population.
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Belgian officials were miffed when Donald Trump recently used a chart showing Belgium as the worst-
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affected country. A “vile” insinuation, commented Denis Ducarme, a Belgian minister. Even in Belgium,
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some criticise this approach as too speculative, but it may mean fewer nasty surprises later on. “France and
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Belgium have been pretty exemplary in publishing data on suspected or probable deaths from covid-19 in
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care homes,” says Adelina Comas-Herrera, at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre of the London School
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of Economics. From early April the French health ministry began to push testing into care homes, even if
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the roll-out has been uneven and painfully slow in places. This has helped to uncover a pattern that fairly
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well matches excess mortality as recorded by INSEE, the statistics body. Thanks to a fall during lockdown in
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other deaths, notably on the roads, total mortality in France has now dropped back to normal levels.
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Contrast such relative transparency with official figures in the Netherlands. Its statistics on covid-19 deaths
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capture only 51% of estimated excess mortality. This is partly a measure of more restrictive recording. The
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national public-health institute includes in its tally only those who have tested positive. But Dutch figures
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also seem to capture poorly what is happening in its care homes. It has no systematic policy of testing there,
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and unco-ordinated data collection. According to a paper by Florien Kruse, Toine Remers and Patrick
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Jeurissen of the Radboud University Medical Centre, “deaths are underreported in nursing homes.” As
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Europe begins to emerge from lockdown, those countries with a low or unreported share of covid-19 deaths
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in their care homes could well be in for a shock. Besides the Netherlands, Spain and Britain look particularly
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exposed. Spain in theory requires regional governments to provide figures. But, say Ms Comas-Herrera and
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her LSE colleagues, methodological problems mean that the health ministry has not yet released any
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national data on care-home deaths. As for Britain, the daily death toll in care homes is still rising, even as
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that in hospitals falls. Angela McLean, deputy chief scientific adviser, this week stated bluntly: “We need to
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get to grips with what is happening in care homes.” ■

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Matteo Renzi, whose small Italia Viva party could rob Mr Conte of his majority, has threatened to withdraw
his support if more is not swiftly done to revive the ailing economy.
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At least two reasons help explain the hesitancy of what many Italians call Phase 1.5. The prime minister,
Giuseppe Conte, faces contrasting fears of infection on the one hand, and of impoverishment on the other.
Italy had recorded more deaths than any other country in Europe except Britain (whose figures include
care-home deaths, which Italy’s do not): 29,684 by May 6th. But while its economy suffered less than those
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of either France or Spain in the first quarter, the IMF forecasts a devastating contraction, of 9.1%, by year’s
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end. With debts of almost 135% of GDP before the pandemic struck, and still unsure how much help it will
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get from Italy’s EU partners, the government has been reluctant to throw much money at the problems
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covid-19 is causing for individuals and companies. Mr Conte’s other problem is the unevenness with which
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the virus has struck. As the restrictions were eased, three regions in the centre and south were free of fresh
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contagion. In Lombardy, the region around Milan, more than 3,500 people had tested positive in the
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previous five days.
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TURKEY Istanbully The government investigates those who object to homophobia 544 words ISTANBUL
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STUCK AT HOME during Ramadan because of covid-19, Turks at least have something new to argue about.
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In a sermon marking the start of the holy month on April 24th, Ali Erbas, the country’s top religious official,
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proclaimed that Islam condemned homosexuality “because it brought illnesses and generational decay”.
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After human-rights groups, some opposition politicians and the Ankara Bar Association accused Mr Erbas
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of inciting hatred, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his supporters rushed to the cleric’s
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defence. One of his flacks said Mr Erbas could not be faulted for voicing “divine judgment”. Another accused
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his critics of Islamophobia. “An attack against the head of the Diyanet is an attack on the state,” Mr Erdogan
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himself warned, referring to the institution Mr Erbas has headed since 2017. “What he said was completely
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true.” The same day, state prosecutors launched an investigation—against the Ankara Bar. Scripturally
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speaking, Mr Erbas had a point. The Koran takes a dim view of homosexuals (not to mention atheists,
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drinkers and women who disobey their husbands). But though homosexuality is outlawed in most other
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Muslim countries and punished by death in a few, it is not a crime in constitutionally secular Turkey. The
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Diyanet, which runs the country’s 90,000 mosques, provides religious guidance, but has no power to impose
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its prescriptions. LGBT groups have never had it easy in Turkey, though prejudice seems to be on the wane.
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As recently as 2012, a whopping 85% of Turks said they did not want to have a gay neighbour. In a new poll,
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that had fallen to 47%. But while public attitudes have softened, official ones have hardened. Only a decade
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ago, when it still enjoyed good relations with Europe, Mr Erdogan’s government signed a convention
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banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Tens of thousands marched in
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the Pride Parade on Istanbul’s main street under police escort. Today, very little of that spirit remains. The
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pride march has been banned; rubber bullets and tear-gas await those who turn up. The Diyanet, set up
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nearly a century ago to reconcile Islamic teachings with secular values, has turned into the voice of political
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Islam and an arm of the government. Nuanced interpretations of the Koran have given way to a more
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restrictive approach. Gay celebrities are still feted, even in government circles, but only as long as they do
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not discuss their sexuality in public. Mr Erdogan’s attempts to raise what he calls “a pious generation” have
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not had the desired impact, however. Studies show young people are turning away from religion. That may
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be why the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party and the Diyanet have decided to double down.
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“They’re increasingly insecure politically and culturally and they don’t want to give an inch to those who
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take other interpretations of Islam,” says Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. “Now
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there’s a spirit of defensive jihad against moral laxity and relativism.” In the row over Mr Erbas, Mr Erdogan
and his surrogates are suggesting that there is only one immutable Islam, which should not accommodate
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changing norms. Turkey’s history suggests that is not true. But anyone who still thinks moderate Islam and
AK belong in the same sentence might want to take note. ■
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A genuinely European political debate is emerging. Whether it will last is another matter. Interest in the life
of the EU has peaks and troughs. When the EU appears on the edge, it dominates headlines. (An irony of
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Brexit was that the actions of the EU dominated British journalism in a way they seldom had before Britain
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decided to leave.) But when the EU sails through serene waters, journalists look for drama elsewhere. After
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this crisis passes, the audience may narrow again. Public opinion will keep its national boundaries while
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true power resides far from Brussels. The discourse may be increasingly European, but the voters who count
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are still as national as ever.
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OFFICES The shape of things to come
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the office
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1069 words ON MAY 10TH Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is expected to outline the beginning of the
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end of lockdown. Non-essential shops will start to reopen and factories will gradually get back to work,
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while maintaining sensible distancing. For the deskbound, not much will change. Unlike pubs, restaurants
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and non-essential retailers, offices were not closed by government decree. Instead, since late March, the
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government has been encouraging those who can work from home to do so. As The Economist went to
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press, it was due to issue guidance on how to work safely in offices. The main thrust is expected to be, for
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now, not to. A few will start to return. Those who need better IT support and faster broadband than they
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have at home will be back sooner. Banks expect traders to work from either their normal offices or from
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disaster-recovery sites. Charlie Rudd, chief executive of Leo Burnett, an advertising firm, reckons design
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and production staff will be among the first back: “when you’re dealing with big files of high-quality material
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domestic Wi-Fi is not great”. But for now, the numbers are likely to be small. Nicolas Aubert, head of British
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operations at WillisTowersWatson, an advisory firm, says that “it’s going to be a very small percentage of
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our population, we believe that is going to be roughly 25% for six to nine months”. And many bosses predict
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that the pandemic will lead to a step-change in homeworking and the demand for office space. According
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to the Office for National Statistics around one in 20 workers did their jobs mainly from home in December
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2019. Thanks to faster internet connections, the number is edging up. Chris Grigg, the chief executive of
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British Land, a property company, notes that the car parks near rail stations in commuter towns are already
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emptier on a typical Friday than in the rest of the week. Will Gosling from Deloitte, a professional-services
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company, believes the pandemic has brought about a “five-year acceleration” of a trend that was already
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under way: it has shown that working from home is feasible and has made it more acceptable. The old view
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that “you’ve got an easy day” if you work from home has become much less common, he says. Attitudes
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have shifted rapidly. A business-continuity planner at a financial-services firm says that before the
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lockdown, when the company initially pondered moving to split working to enforce more distancing in their
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offices, “no one wanted to be on the working from home side. But a few weeks later, as we started planning
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how to get back to the office, everyone wanted to stay at home.” More than half of Britons would like to
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work from home more often after the crisis and around a third say the ability to work at home will be a
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factor when they next seek a new job. Nobody is yet committing to flogging their own headquarters and,
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in the short term, the need for social distancing within offices may prop up demand. But some bosses are
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predicting radical changes that will delight chief financial officers eyeing potential savings from dumping
expensive city-centre locations. Jes Staley, chief executive of Barclays, has said that large headquarters
buildings may become a “thing of the past”. Mr Aubert “would be very surprised if corporations in
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professional services kept more than 50% of their real estate, and it might be significantly less”. Even a
commercial-property manager admits that “there is a serious risk that what was once a prime real-estate
asset is now an overpriced half-empty building.” The pandemic has prompted firms to think hard about
what offices are for, and many are concluding that a lot of tasks are better done from home. Lee Elliott of
Knight Frank, an estate agent, reckons that “the days of people taking a 74-minute average commute into
town to process email, and then 74 minutes back out—they’re gone.” Mr Gosling believes that “the focus
of the workplace will be much more around collaboration, much more around the things you can only get
the most value from by being together.” That will be more important to some sectors than others. Mr Rudd
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of Leo Burnett reckons that “in the advertising world many people thrive off that collaboration and being
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together, and so they will still need offices where they can do that.” But if social distancing limits the
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number of people who can work physically together, it will undermine the office’s collaborative function.
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“I’d happily go back if everyone was going back,” says an executive at a technology firm, “but it makes no
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sense if only one in four people are there. I might as well be at home.” More home working will mean new
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challenges for managers. Home workers are harder to monitor and so trust becomes more important. It
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will be harder for junior employees than senior ones. Junior employees need mentoring, want to socialise
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and have worse living conditions. But the decisions on the future of offices will be made by those for whom
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the alternative is more likely to be a nice house than a bedsit. Some even predict the decline of office
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politics. “Normally in the office power structure, there’s always one who’s chatting up the powers that be,
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being just perched outside the office door when they’re going for lunch or for coffee,” according to Ann
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Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute. When people work at home, “that kind of
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political operator is rendered useless.” If companies shrink their office space, the impact could be felt well
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beyond the firms themselves. “Getting rid of those physical barriers between cities will actually make us
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much more diverse,” says Tanuj Kapilashrami, head of human resources at Standard Chartered, who
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predicts that the firm will recruit from a wider pool. “I think there will be a significant movement of people
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out of London,” says Mr Gosling. “If I was in Boris’s shoes, the opportunity for the so-called ‘level-up’ is
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unbelievable,” says Mr Aubert, referring to the prime minister’s plan to raise incomes outside London and
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the south-east. There could be consequences for infrastructure, social geography and the subject closest
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to the British heart—house prices. The need for workers to cluster together in offices has shaped every
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aspect of modern life. If the pandemic has weakened the office’s hold on society, the implications will be
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profound.■
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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 801 | Ajouté le lundi 18 mai 2020 07:20:10

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SOLAR POWER Rays of hope The Arab world is increasingly looking to the sun for energy 590 words BENBAN
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Down on the farm TWO MILLENNIA after the ancient Egyptians dropped their solar deity, Ra, their
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descendants are rediscovering the power of the sun. In the southern desert, half an hour’s drive from
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Aswan, Egypt is putting the finishing touches to Benban, one of the world’s largest solar farms (pictured).
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Its 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of energy, enough to power over 1m homes. “In a decade we’ll
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still need oil for plastics and other petrochemicals, but not for energy,” says Rabeaa Fattal, a Dubai-based
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investor in Rising Sun, one of Benban’s 40 fields. Much of the modern Middle East and north Africa was
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built on oil. It exports more of the black stuff than any other region. A quarter of Middle Eastern power
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comes from it, compared with 3% from renewable sources. But the recent collapse in oil prices is a reminder
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that it is risky to depend on a single source of revenue. And in the long run the global trend is towards
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cleaner energy sources. Renewable-energy capacity in the Middle East has doubled to 40 gigawatts (GW)
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over the past decade and is set to double again by 2024. With its vast deserts, the Arab world’s most
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abundant clean-energy source is the sun. Non-oil economies were first to take advantage of it. More than
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a third of Morocco’s energy now comes from renewables (in the EU the average is 18%). Oil producers are
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catching up. A big project in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), recently received
the world’s lowest tariff bid for solar power. Oman, Kuwait and Qatar have large projects, too. The Middle
East as a whole generates 9GW of solar power, up from a paltry 91 megawatts a decade ago. Between 2008
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and 2018 investment in the field increased 12-fold. The growing competitiveness of renewables makes
analysts optimistic that the trend will continue (see chart). Solar farms are cheaper, faster and safer to build
and maintain than oil and gas plants. The UAE’s new solar plant will generate electricity at roughly two-
thirds the cost of gas and a third that of oil, even at today’s low prices. Several countries in the region speak
of becoming renewable-energy exporters. Investors, though, still have cause to hesitate. For a start, Arab
autocrats often promise more than they deliver. Take Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi
Arabia, who has made renewable energy a pillar of his economic-reform plan. In 2018 he and SoftBank, a
Japanese conglomerate, announced the world’s biggest solar-power-generation project in the Saudi desert.
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It was shelved six months later. Regional turmoil scares investors away, too. Iraq’s electricity minister
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blames protests for derailing his plans to meet 20% of demand with renewables by 2030. Conflicts in
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neighbouring countries have damned Jordan’s efforts to export solar power to Lebanon. Turbulent Egypt
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offered to buy solar power at above-market rates in order to attract investors to Benban. There is also a
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risk that, in the short term, cheap oil dims countries’ ardour for solar power. Saudi Arabia, for example,
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might prefer to burn more oil for energy. Declining revenues could force oil-producing states to suspend
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new solar projects. But such projects are largely driven by the private sector, and they continue to compare
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favourably with fossil fuels. “We have seen an acceleration in tenders during covid-19,” says Paddy
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Padmanathan of ACWA Power, a Saudi firm that operates renewable-energy projects. “Why spend money
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taking fuel out of the ground and processing it rather than relying on God-given free sun and wind?” ■
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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 921-934 | Ajouté le lundi 18 mai 2020 07:25:15
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WHEN CONDUCTING war games between China and America, David Ochmanek of RAND Corporation, a
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think-tank, worries most about an invasion of Taiwan, the security of which is implicitly guaranteed by
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America. In one scenario the red team unleashes a “joint firepower strike” on Taiwan’s defence forces and
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on American forces, bases and command-and-control nodes in the Pacific, including on Okinawa and Guam.
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Many of the blue team’s planes are destroyed on the ground, and its runways disabled. China severs
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communication links as part of an effort to gain information superiority, part of a full-spectrum strategy
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called “system-destruction warfare”. Then comes the amphibious assault on the island. American
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submarines knock out some portion of the invasion force with torpedoes, but surface-level carriers and
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frigates are hammered by Chinese anti-ship missiles if they venture near the fight. “We always assume that
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the United States intervenes forcefully and early,” Mr Ochmanek says. But now, in contrast to years past,
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“I would not have confidence that we would succeed.” The probability of such a world-changing military
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conflict between the two countries remains mercifully low. But it is becoming something to ponder beyond
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simulations, a reflection of how grim their relationship has become. Lesser conflicts may be reignited this
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year—over trade, technology, espionage and propaganda and disinformation—while the American death
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toll from covid-19 climbs. The world’s two largest economies, so long intertwined through trade and
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investment, are heading towards a partial decoupling. There is less trust between the two governments
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than at any time since the normalisation of relations in 1979. And as an election approaches in November,
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the chances of misunderstanding, miscalculation and provocation are escalating on both sides.
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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1089 | Ajouté le mardi 19 mai 2020 07:35:14

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EDUCATION AND SOCIETY The social experiment

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A more effective scheme than affirmative action has flown under the radar
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916 words
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CHICAGO AND NEW YORK GROWING UP IN Morris Heights, a poor neighbourhood in the Bronx where
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violence was omnipresent, Joel Cabrera thought his future would be either “death or jail, because that’s
what the outcomes are here”. Middle school was like “a juvenile-detention facility”. High school did not
interest him enough to finish. Had he stopped there, he would have faced a life on the edge of penury.
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Among high-school dropouts nationwide, average earnings are only $600 a week. To avoid that, Mr Cabrera
enrolled in courses offered at his local community college. There he came across a scheme called ASAP
(“Accelerated Study in Associate Programmes”) that sought to push pupils like him—city residents without
family wealth or familiarity with universities—to complete two-year degrees. ASAP is designed to address
a simply stated problem. Many low-income minority students enroll in college. But few finish. Only 34% of
black men finish their bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with the average rate of 60%. Those
individual decisions to drop out collectively amount to society-wide stratification. The racial gaps in earning
college degrees have hardly budged since 1995. Simple as the problem may be to describe, the approach
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taken by ASAP is complicated. Rather than target one thing that derails students, the programme tries to
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tackle many at once. Pupils are given financial help, including money for textbooks and free MetroCards to
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get around the city. They must meet academic and career advisers several times a month. They are tracked
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by a data operation that detects pupils in precarious positions before they quit. This worked for Mr Cabrera,
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who continued to a bachelor’s degree, a few internships and a series of good jobs after that. He is not
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unusual. Students in the ASAP programme have a three-year graduation rate of 53%—more than double
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the 25% rate in the rest of the City University of New York (CUNY) system and close to triple the national
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average. In 2015, when external researchers tested these impressive outcomes by randomly assigning
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students—the gold standard for social science—they found effects of the same magnitude. The greatest
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gains went to black and Hispanic students, as well as those receiving Pell grants (most of which go to
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students with annual family incomes of $20,000 a year or less). Since then, the programme has grown and
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community-college systems across the country are trying to replicate it. In New York the average cost of
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the additional supports amount to $3,500 per student. But such schemes benefit college finances too, by
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increasing their revenue. Georgia State University’s programme to provide micro-grants, which began in
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2012, seemed to boost both graduation rates and university finances. “That’s actually a big driver of this
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completion movement [because] enrolments are not going up,” says Patrick Methvin of the Gates
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Foundation, which has funded research in the field. “The economics on this are going from nice to
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necessary.” Though not small, the cost also looks like a pittance compared with many ideas to alleviate
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intergenerational poverty. A child born poor who gets just a high-school degree has a 50% chance of
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remaining in poverty as an adult; with a college degree, the chances decline to 17%. More evidence is
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accumulating to show that the approach works beyond New York. Starting in 2015, three community
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colleges in Ohio imported the ASAP model, with some modifications (such as offering money for petrol
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rather than for the subway). A randomised controlled trial by MDRC, a research outfit, found it nearly
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doubled the chances of completing degrees (35% compared with 19% in the control group). Two
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community colleges in West Virginia are set to try the system next. “We’re quite pleased to see that the
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model has been attempted in other places, and the numbers tend to look good too,” says Félix Matos
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Rodríguez, the chancellor of the CUNY system. Perhaps the strongest corroboration that the ingredients
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are indeed right comes from Chicago, where a similar programme has improved the lot of students in the
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local community-college system. One Million Degrees (OMD), a project started in 2012, provides tutoring,
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professional development and cash grants to qualifying students: 80% of them black and Hispanic, 90%
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qualifying for Pell grants and 60% first-generation students. It is similar to the New York programme
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because, “if you really ask students what they need and observe what the challenges are”, you arrive in a
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similar place, says Paige Ponder, the organisation’s CEO. Initial results of a randomised controlled trial
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conducted by the University of Chicago Poverty Lab of 4,000 applicants found that participants were 35%
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likelier to persist through the first year of college. Talk to the students in the programme, and you find that
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no single element boosts their chances of finishing university as much as the whole cocktail. This well-
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tested, cost-effective scheme has largely escaped national attention. To many, the whole question of equity
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in American universities can be reduced simply to the racial make-up of the Ivy League institutions. Besides
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ignoring the incomes of students at those colleges, who tend to be rich whatever their race and colour, this
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also assigns central importance to the controversial affirmative-action policies of highly selective
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universities. Although the share of black students attending Harvard is symbolically important, the situation
of those happy few is divorced from the continued social immobility among successive cohorts of black
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students. Endless debate about affirmative action—which could soon wind up before the Supreme Court
yet again—is a diversion from a less controversial method that works. ■
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BARTLEBY Don’t stand so close to me Architects and designers are reconfiguring the office 747 words
OFFICE WORKING and social distancing really do not mix. The reason why offices exist is to bring colleagues
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together so they can collaborate. So when employees start to return as pandemic-related restrictions are
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lifted, they will face a host of challenges. Start with the basics: getting into the building. In most offices a
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lot of people tend to leave and arrive at the same time. Keeping them six feet (two metres) apart as they
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enter may require a queue in the street. Many workers will want to avoid public transport until the
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pandemic fades from memory, so may cycle to work. But even where offices have changing rooms, they
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tend to be fairly cramped; hard to keep employees apart. Lifts are an even bigger choke-point. In normal
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circumstances people who work in high-rises are accustomed to a long wait to reach the top floors. If lifts
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can only carry two or three people at a time, that wait would lengthen. And imagine the hassle if a group
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of visitors arrives at once. When workers make it to their desks, there is another problem. In recent years
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offices have been increasing density. The space per workstation in Britain decreased by around a quarter
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in the decade to 2018, according to Jon Neale of JLL, a property consultancy. But social-distancing rules may
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drastically reduce the number of people offices can accommodate. Nick Jackson of Arup, an engineering
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and architectural group, says a two-metre space between desks in a central London office building may
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reduce the number of staff it can host to 30-35% of the pre-pandemic total. In the short term, these
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problems have an obvious answer: let people work from home, or bring them into the office in shifts
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(maybe two days a week). This will limit serendipity but is better than nothing. The trickier question is
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whether office design will change in the longer run. Some high-tech solutions floated before the pandemic
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appear newly relevant. Zaha Hadid Architects, a big British firm, has designed an eco-friendly building in
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Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates, with “contactless pathways”, where employees rarely need to
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touch the building with their hands. Doors open automatically using motion sensors and facial recognition;
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lifts (and even a cuppa) can be ordered from a smartphone. Other ideas emerged in response to covid-19.
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Besides hand sanitiser at the entrance and touch-free doors, an office in Amsterdam designed by Cushman
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& Wakefield, a property-services group, has desks surrounded by a zone of colour-coded carpet to let
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people know when they are getting too close. At the start of the day workers pick up a paper deskpad on
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which to rest their laptop, and which is discarded when they leave. Arrows on the floor guide them to move
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around clockwise. All very clever. You could even imagine it working—for a few weeks. But after a while
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the rules would surely be broken. Bert wants to talk to Ernie who is within sight and just a dozen feet away
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in an anticlockwise direction. Will he really take the long route around? And physical distance from
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colleagues is one thing. The potential for germs to be spread via communal items and surfaces is another.
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Think about the handle on the kettle or the controls of the photocopier. The much-loved snack cupboard
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at The Economist is probably doomed. The new emphasis will be on cleanliness. Facilities managers will
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take a leaf from “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, a science-fiction novel by Douglas Adams,
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where the Golgafrinchans exiled telephone sanitisers and other useless people (such as insurance salesmen
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and management consultants) on a spaceship, only for their planet’s population to be wiped out by a virus
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contracted from a dirty handset. Better air filtration to limit the spread of disease may bring other benefits.
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One study found that the extra costs of improving air quality could be paid back in less than two years, in
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terms of higher productivity and reduced ill health. But not all improvements will be as cost-effective. The
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reason employees are crammed together is to cut rental expenses. One wonders whether, if a vaccine is
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found and social distancing no longer required, firms will consider office redesign is worth the candle. Some
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elements, like more cleanliness, may stick. The pandemic will speed up the trend towards virtual meetings
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and home-working. Companies may try to lure highly skilled workers with more personal space, like first-
class seats on an aeroplane. But the masses will still be crammed in economy.
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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 2861-2865 | Ajouté le mardi 19 mai 2020 07:56:52
All this is only a continuation of television’s century-long siphoning of content away from the cinema. Movie
theatres were once the home of all types of video. From the 1950s TV nabbed news, cartoons and serials,
leaving cinemas with only feature films. Now streaming is sucking up many of those too, so that the theatre
is a place to visit just for event movies. Something is being lost: an evening at home with Netflix isn’t quite
the same as a night at the Ocala, reflects Mr Watzke. People may enjoy a film just as much on TV. But “if
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they see it at the drive-in, it’s a memory.”
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JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES Alive in the long run
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796 words The Price of Peace. By Zachary Carter. Random House; 656 pages; $35 and £25 ANY BIOGRAPHER
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of John Maynard Keynes must labour in the shadow of Robert Skidelsky’s magisterial three volumes about
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the great economist. Zachary Carter, a journalist at the Huffington Post, has tackled the problem in an
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ingenious way, by focusing on the development of Keynes’s ideas and how they fared after his death in
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1946. The result is an entertaining summary of 20th-century economic history that will appeal to the
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general reader. The key to Keynes, Mr Carter shows, is to place him in his time and class—a well-heeled
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British intellectual who moved effortlessly between the worlds of academia, government and the arts. Born
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in 1883, he grew up at a time when the British Empire was at its peak, which, for people like Keynes, was
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an age of peace and prosperity. The idyll was destroyed by the first world war and, in part, Keynes’s life was
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a bid to restore the better parts of that lost world. He first made his name by raging against the terms of
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the Versailles peace treaty; his economic views were shaped by the experience of Britain in the 1920s,
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which was marked by deflation and high unemployment. Then came the Great Depression, which seemed
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to show the folly of the classical view of an economy as a machine which, if left to its own devices, would
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return to equilibrium. For Keynes, this was a call to action. He perceived “the real struggle” to be between
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liberalism, in which the primary objectives of government were peace, freedom of trade and economic
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wealth, and a militarist school “which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the
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imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice”. In a sense, he wanted to save capitalism from
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itself. Mr Carter sees Keynes’s career as an attempt “to make the practical risk-averse anti-revolutionary
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conservatism of Burke fit the radical democratic ideals advanced by Rousseau”. Given Keynes’s standing
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today, it is easy to forget how often his advice was ignored during his lifetime. In spite of his opposition,
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Britain’s Conservatives restored the gold standard in 1925. He backed Lloyd George’s Liberals in the election
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of 1929, just as the party was descending into irrelevance. While some elements of Franklin Roosevelt’s
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new deal were Keynesian, the president regarded the economist as an indecipherable mystic. And at the
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Bretton Woods conference of 1944 many of Keynes’s plans for the post-war economic order were overruled
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by the Americans. His greatest influence was exerted after his death, as the economics profession
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overwhelmingly adopted his ideas in the three decades after the war. As Mr Carter says: “Keynesianism
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took on a life of its own Keynes himself could scarcely have predicted.” His legacy was affected by the style
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of his intellect and writing, which had been honed in Cambridge common rooms and Bloomsbury salons;
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he expressed his ideas more in arresting bons mots than in mathematical equations. Partly as a
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consequence, his magnum opus, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, is a confusing
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read. Keynes recommended that governments should manage aggregate demand or purchasing power, but
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did not say precisely how they should do so. He enshrined full employment as the main measure of success
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but did not define the term. Instead, Keynesianism was defined by his colleagues, such as Joan Robinson
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and John Hicks, and intellectuals like J.K. Galbraith. That philosophy was in turn attacked in the 1960s and
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1970s by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and others, who argued that Keynesianism had resulted in
government playing too big a role in the economy and a chronic tendency towards inflation. Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher presided over a big shift away from the use of fiscal policy to manage the economic
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cycle, with monetary policy taking the strain. Mr Carter is dismissive of these anti-Keynesian reactions. Still,
you have to wonder whether Keynes, who relied on his investment income to fund his lifestyle, would have
been enthusiastic about the economic policies of the mid-1970s, which in Britain yielded a top rate of
income tax of 83% and inflation of over 25%. For a while, as the profession moved away from his ideas, it
looked as if Keynes might become one of the “defunct economists” he once quipped about. But the 21st
century has restored his reputation. In 2009, in response to the financial crisis, G20 governments agreed
on the kind of co-ordinated fiscal stimulus that Keynes would surely have recommended. The pandemic
has led to yet another round of government action to stave off depression. Meanwhile, increasing use of
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automation has revived interest in Keynes’s thoughts about a shortened working week, which he
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expounded in “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren”. The world will be debating, and learning
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from, the work of Keynes for many decades to come. ■
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BY INVITATION The pandemic is a turning point in history The crisis exposes our weaknesses. Will our
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leaders choose reform or calamity? 989 words IN THE WINTER of 1788-89, the desperate government of
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Louis XVI asked the French people to send in lists of their grievances. It was a fatal mistake. The cahiers de
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doléances served to articulate the public’s unspoken discontent and, equally important, its hopes for a
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better world. A crucial psychological barrier had fallen: it became possible to imagine a very different
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France. And the times—the moral and actual bankruptcy of the Ancien Régime, widespread crop failures
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and hopeless leadership—gave shape to the public’s aspirations. The fuse was lit for revolution. France in
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1789. Russia in 1917. The Europe of the 1930s. The pandemic of 2020. They are all junctures where the
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river of history changes direction. The covid-19 crisis may be a pivotal rather than a revolutionary moment
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but it, too, is challenging the old order. Like France’s cahiers, the coronavirus forces questions about what
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sort of future we want, what the proper role of government is and what makes a healthy society. We face
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a choice: to build better ways of dealing domestically and internationally with this challenge (and prepare
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for inevitable future ones) or let our world become meaner and more selfish, divided and suspicious. Long
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before covid-19, popular thinkers like Thomas Piketty, the late Tony Judt and Paul Krugman were warning
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about deep social inequalities and the shortcomings of globalisation. There were sporadic protests like
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Occupy Wall Street or France’s gilets jaunes. Most of us (such is human nature) carried on living. We worried
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from time to time about climate change, that our children couldn’t afford houses and that there seemed
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to be more obscenely rich people along with more homeless ones. Covid-19 has turned a spotlight on the
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dark sides of our world. We have become aware of the fragility of international supply lines, the
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disadvantages of offshore sources for critical goods and the limits of international bodies. The chaotic
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responses and blame games of certain governments have exacerbated divisions in and among societies,
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perhaps permanently. America has withdrawn from moral and material leadership of the world. It and
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China have grown more hostile to one another, not less. Rogue states such as Russia gleefully make more
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trouble and the UN is increasingly marginalised. When you name things—grievances, say, as the French
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did—you give them form and make it harder to ignore them. We are doing that now with the flaws in our
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world and spelling out our hopes for something better. As the French looked at Britain and America as
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models, we can see that South Korea, Denmark and New Zealand have controlled the pandemic more
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effectively than other countries, in part because their peoples have faith in the authorities and each other.
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Without trust—that the water is clean, medicines are safe, or thugs won’t get away with it—societies are
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vulnerable. Covid-19 has caused fewer deaths proportionately in Germany than elsewhere because of the
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country’s well-funded health system and its competent state and federal governments. As history shows,
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those societies that survive and adapt best to catastrophes are already strong. Britain rose to the challenge
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of the Nazis because it was united; France was not and did not. Much also depended then, and depends
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now, on leaders. As weaknesses are exposed, do leaders fix or exploit them? While Franklin Roosevelt was
promising Americans a better tomorrow in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was destroying the Weimar Republic and
intoxicating Germans with promises of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. As we know, that ended in a
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world war. For every Jacinda Ardern or Angela Merkel, the leaders of New Zealand and Germany who are
talking to their citizens about the difficult road ahead, there is an illiberal, populist demagogue playing to
baser fears and fantasies. In Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro dismisses covid-19 as “the sniffles”; in India the
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party blames it on the Muslims. President Donald Trump claimed he had “total”
authority, demonstrating something about his instincts if not his knowledge of the American constitution.
Wise leaders in the past have been able to steer away from danger. In 1830 Britain was coping with unrest
in Ireland, violent strikes at home and demands for more power from the growing commercial and
industrial middle classes. The enlightened aristocrats of the new Whig government believed that they had
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a choice between revolution and reform, even if the latter was at the expense of their own power and
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privilege. In 1832 their Great Reform Act widened the franchise for Parliament. The Whigs did not remove
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all grievances, but they muted them. A century later another child of privilege, Roosevelt, brought in the
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New Deal which helped to save American society and capitalism. The present crisis could be the opportunity
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for strategies to produce essential public goods and ensure that citizens have safe, decent and fulfilled lives.
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People coming out of a calamity are open to sweeping changes. Governments will find it hard to resist
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demands for improved social programmes now that they are spending as though John Maynard Keynes
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were in the room. Will the British again accept an underfunded National Health Service? And countries
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could invest in key organisations like the World Health Organisation and give it greater power to protect
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the world from disease. Perhaps, just perhaps, bodies such as the G7 and G20 could become forums for
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unity and not dissent. Future historians, if there are any who can still research and speak freely, will analyse
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the choices that individual countries and the world made. Let us hope the story shows the better angels of
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our nature, in Abraham Lincoln’s words: enlightened leaders and publics creating together sane and
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inclusive policies, and strengthening our vital institutions at home and abroad. The alternative story will
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not have a happy ending. ■ Margaret MacMillan is a historian at the University of Toronto. This article is
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part of a series on the world after covid-19. For more coverage of the pandemic visit
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Economist.com/coronavirus
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THE EU’S BAD CRISIS

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On the blink
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1076 words SEVENTY YEARS ago this month Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, proposed a
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European “coal and steel community”. With that humble agreement governing two commodities, six war-
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ravaged countries created a common market that evolved into the European Union. The journey towards
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integration since then has been bumpy, but it has had a sense of direction. National leaders came and went,
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the Berlin Wall rose and fell, economic hurricanes struck and blew themselves out. Somehow, the EU
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muddled through. It deepened, building the world’s largest single market, letting its people move freely
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across borders and creating a common currency. It broadened, as 22 states joined the original six, including
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11 that had suffered for decades under communism. It cemented peace and spread prosperity. Today,
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Europe is a beacon of liberal values and an exemplar of a gentler type of capitalism. Yet the EU has also lost
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its way. The pandemic in Europe is not just an economic crisis, as elsewhere in the world, but is fast
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becoming a political and constitutional crisis, too. This is solvable in principle, but the EU’s members cannot
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agree on what is needed to make their union more resilient, nor on how to bring about reform. Now of all
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times, when America and China are at loggerheads, that is a tragic missed opportunity. Belonging to the EU
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is supposed to bring countries safety in a dangerous world. Instead the pandemic is testing the bonds of
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membership, just as the financial crisis of 2007-09 did (see Briefing). One example is the single market. This
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is governed by strict rules limiting subsidies, but they have been suspended as governments pour €2trn
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($2.2trn) into saving businesses from collapse. Half of this was in Germany: a problem if you are a producer
based in a country that cannot afford to be so generous, but which must accept German-made goods.
Another example is the single currency. As countries cushion the effects of lockdowns, their debts are rising
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sharply. Because governments in the euro zone borrow in a common currency but must finance themselves,
these debts could rise to unsustainable levels. The problem is severe in Italy, which was in trouble even
before covid-19 struck and had gross public debts of €2.4trn, or 135% of GDP. Italy’s Eurosceptic firebrand,
Matteo Salvini, is hammering the EU for doing too little to help; his party may yet ride this crisis to power,
where it would thrive on creating outrage and exploiting divisions with far-off Brussels. A third example is
the status of EU law. Earlier this month Germany’s constitutional court questioned whether the European
Court of Justice (ECJ) should have ruled that the European Central Bank could, in effect, backstop the euro
by buying debt. Separately, Poland has disputed the ECJ’s precedence over its own supreme court. The EU
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is built on law. If the stresses of the pandemic weaken the ECJ’s foundations, the entire union will shake.
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All these problems can be solved with vision, compromise and reform. Indeed, before the pandemic
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France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, warned that the EU needed to fortify itself against a less forgiving
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world. But such sentiments crumble before countries’ different views of what the EU should be for. The
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prosperous north hates the idea of a “transfer union” that subsidises the needy south—and it hates even
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more the prospect of mutualising any of the poorer members’ debt. Members cannot agree on what to do
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about the erosion of democracy and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland. Even before the first death
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from covid-19, they struggled to forge common policies on defence, Russia, migration and much more
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besides. Ominously, the mechanism of reform is also broken. Ever since Schuman’s day, the EU has grown
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by repeatedly amending the treaties that govern it. But EU leaders have shied away from treaty change
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since the plan for a new constitution was thrown out by French and Dutch voters in 2005. Leaders have not
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dared to put through a significant amendment since 2007. Some northern European leaders recognise that
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they have a problem. In the coming months they are likely to agree to a one-off increase in the EU’s seven-
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year budget, but the terms are in dispute—the southerners are calling for as much as €1trn-1.5trn and they
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want grants, not loans. There is also a proposal to issue common debt as a token gesture, but that is
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disputed, too. If the EU is to thrive, it will have to be a lot more ambitious than the northerners admit. For
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a start, if it is not to stagnate it will need to adapt, and this means overcoming the taboo against treaty
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change. Successful treaty change entails a broader acknowledgment that different countries want different
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things from the union and that such a “multi-speed Europe” can be more resilient than today’s unmet
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aspirations. That, in turn, requires the EU to complete projects like the euro that are vulnerable to shocks
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because they are only half-done. Doomsters have often predicted the break-up of the EU or the euro, only
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to be proved wrong. Muddling through can go on for a long time—especially now that Britain has shown
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how painful and expensive divorce would be. In the end, though, political systems are judged by their
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outcomes. The failure to reform treaties puts a burden on the ECJ and the rule of law; German subsidies
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risk undermining the single market; and economic stagnation will poison the euro. The Zoom where it
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happens So long as the EU remains a conduit for spreading crises, the risk of collapse will be high. To stiffen
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their resolve, its leaders should reflect on a more remote anniversary. In June it will be 230 years since the
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Compromise of 1790, when Alexander Hamilton persuaded Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to allow
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the new United States government to assume the debt of the 13 individual states. Europe does not need
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to go so far, and a latter-day Hamilton has no obvious carrot to offer the rich states (in 1790 the deal put
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America’s new capital city in the South). But there is a stick: if Europe’s wobbly members do not get help,
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the euro and the single market could eventually implode. European leaders currently negotiating by
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videoconference must therefore be bold. Bigger transfers and significant debt mutualisation would be hard,
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but as a down payment to avert catastrophe and to set the EU on the path to stability, they would be worth
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it. ■
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THE WORLD ECONOMY Goodbye globalization

A more nationalistic and self-sufficient era beckons. It won’t be richer—or safer
1025 words EVEN BEFORE the pandemic, globalisation was in trouble. The open system of trade that had
dominated the world economy for decades had been damaged by the financial crash and the Sino-American
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trade war. Now it is reeling from its third body-blow in a dozen years as lockdowns have sealed borders and
disrupted commerce (see Briefing). The number of passengers at Heathrow has dropped by 97% year-on-
year; Mexican car exports fell by 90% in April; 21% of transpacific container-sailings in May have been
cancelled. As economies reopen, activity will recover, but don’t expect a quick return to a carefree world
of unfettered movement and free trade. The pandemic will politicise travel and migration and entrench a
bias towards self-reliance. This inward-looking lurch will enfeeble the recovery, leave the economy
vulnerable and spread geopolitical instability. The world has had several epochs of integration, but the
trading system that emerged in the 1990s went further than ever before. China became the world’s factory
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and borders opened to people, goods, capital and information (see Chaguan). After Lehman Brothers
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collapsed in 2008 most banks and some multinational firms pulled back. Trade and foreign investment
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stagnated relative to GDP, a process this newspaper later called slowbalisation. Then came President
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Donald Trump’s trade wars, which mixed worries about blue-collar jobs and China’s autocratic capitalism
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with a broader agenda of chauvinism and contempt for alliances. At the moment when the virus first started
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to spread in Wuhan last year, America’s tariff rate on imports was back to its highest level since 1993 and
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both America and China had begun to decouple their technology industries. Since January a new wave of
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disruption has spread westward from Asia. Factory, shop and office closures have caused demand to tumble
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and prevented suppliers from reaching customers. The damage is not universal. Food is still getting through,
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Apple insists it can still make iPhones and China’s exports have held up so far, buoyed by sales of medical
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gear. But the overall effect is savage. World goods trade may shrink by 10-30% this year. In the first ten
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days of May exports from South Korea, a trade powerhouse, fell by 46% year-on-year, probably the worst
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decline since records began in 1967. The underlying anarchy of global governance is being exposed. France
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and Britain have squabbled over quarantine rules, China is threatening Australia with punitive tariffs for
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demanding an investigation into the virus’s origins and the White House remains on the warpath about
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trade. Despite some instances of co-operation during the pandemic, such as the Federal Reserve’s loans to
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other central banks, America has been reluctant to act as the world’s leader. Chaos and division at home
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have damaged its prestige. China’s secrecy and bullying have confirmed that it is unwilling—and unfit—to
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pick up the mantle. Around the world, public opinion is shifting away from globalisation. People have been
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disturbed to find that their health depends on a brawl to import protective equipment and on the migrant
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workers who work in care homes and harvest crops. This is just the start. Although the flow of information
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is largely free outside China, the movement of people, goods and capital is not. Consider people first. The
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Trump administration is proposing to curtail immigration further, arguing that jobs should go to Americans
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instead. Other countries are likely to follow. Travel is restricted, limiting the scope to find work, inspect
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plants and drum up orders. Some 90% of people live in countries with largely closed borders. Many
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governments will open up only to countries with similar health protocols: one such “travel bubble” is
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mooted to include Australia and New Zealand and, perhaps, Taiwan and Singapore (see Finance section).
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The industry is signalling that the disruption to travel will be lasting. Airbus has cut production by a third
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and Emirates, a symbol of globalisation, expects no recovery until 2022. Trade will suffer as countries
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abandon the idea that firms and goods are treated equally regardless of where they come from.
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Governments and central banks are asking taxpayers to underwrite national firms through their stimulus
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packages, creating a huge and ongoing incentive to favour them. And the push to bring supply chains back
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home in the name of resilience is accelerating. On May 12th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, told
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the nation that a new era of economic self-reliance has begun. Japan’s covid-19 stimulus includes subsidies
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for firms that repatriate factories; European Union officials talk of “strategic autonomy” and are creating a
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fund to buy stakes in firms. America is urging Intel to build plants at home. Digital trade is thriving but its
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scale is still modest. The sales abroad of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are equivalent to just
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1.3% of world exports. The flow of capital is also suffering, as long-term investment sinks. Chinese venture-
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capital investment in America dropped to $400m in the first quarter of this year, 60% below its level two
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years ago. Multinational firms may cut their cross-border investment by a third this year. America has just
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instructed its main federal pension fund to stop buying Chinese shares, and so far this year countries
representing 59% of world GDP have tightened their rules on foreign investment. As governments try to
pay down their new debts by taxing firms and investors, some countries may be tempted to further restrict
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the flow of capital across borders. It’s lonely out there Don’t be fooled that a trading system with an
unstable web of national controls will be more humane or safer. Poorer countries will find it harder to catch
up and, in the rich world, life will be more expensive and less free. The way to make supply chains more
resilient is not to domesticate them, which concentrates risk and forfeits economies of scale, but to
diversify them. Moreover, a fractured world will make solving global problems harder, including finding a
vaccine and securing an economic recovery. Tragically, this logic is no longer fashionable. Those three body-
blows have so wounded the open system of trade that the powerful arguments in its favour are being
neglected. Wave goodbye to the greatest era of globalisation—and worry about what is going to take its
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place.■
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UNEMPLOYMENT Reopen and shut Freezing labour markets for too long will cost too much and impede the
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recovery 629 words NEVER BEFORE have governments erected safety-nets as generous as those they have
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created during the pandemic. In Britain 7.5m furloughed workers’ wages are being paid in large part by the
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state, which is spending more on them than it is on health care. In France the government is topping up the
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majority of private-sector workers’ incomes after their hours were cut. America has increased
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unemployment benefits by $600 per person per week, almost trebling the average payout. Since March a
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staggering 34m or so claims for this kind of support have been made (see United States section). Germany
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and Japan have boosted their existing subsidy schemes for furloughed or partially furloughed workers.
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These policies have been indispensable. Replacing lost incomes has averted suffering, prevented economies
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from falling apart and ensured public support for social-distancing measures. Yet governments need to
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prepare an exit strategy not just from lockdowns, but also from their emergency policies (see Europe
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section). They cannot replace private incomes indefinitely. If today’s transfers are maintained for too long,
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they will be ruinously expensive and prevent labour markets from adapting to the new way of life that
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emerges from the pandemic. Many of today’s schemes reflect the idea that economies need to be placed
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in deep freeze in order to be revived intact once the crisis subsides. Yet it seems increasingly likely that
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economies will instead be permanently changed. Consumers may emerge from lockdown with new habits
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and fears about mixing, spending less on restaurants, cinemas and travel, and spending more on deliveries,
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home-improvement and video-streaming. Employees may, reasonably, demand higher wages to perform
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some jobs, such as construction or butchering, which involve working elbow-to-elbow with others all day.
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And industries starved of immigrant labour because of border controls may have to entice in more locals.
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Four in ten American jobs lost in the pandemic will not return, according to one estimate based on surveys,
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historical patterns and stockmarket signals. Three in ten gross job losses have already been offset by new
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hiring. The necessary adjustments will not take place while the state pays workers to wait for their old jobs
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to return—often on better money than they got before. In America roughly three-quarters of recipients of
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unemployment insurance are receiving more than they did in work. That blunts the incentive to seek new
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jobs. And yet cutting support abruptly would leave legions of unemployed workers fending for themselves
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in brutal conditions, especially in America with its thin welfare system. Governments thus face a difficult
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balancing act: withdraw support too readily, and many people will suffer; withdraw it too late, and the
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economy will ossify. To find the right path, the most lavish support should be maintained only in industries
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which the government is forcibly keeping closed. Once shops, restaurants and cinemas are allowed to open,
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the market must decide if they have a future. These signals should not be ignored for long. Schemes should
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also encourage flexibility. Idled workers should be allowed to return to their companies part-time, as Britain
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this week pledged. America should make more use of work-sharing schemes, already in place in about half
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of the states, which, as in Europe, provide benefits on the basis of lost hours of work, not just lost jobs. This
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should be paired with unemployment insurance, though neither scheme should pay so much that it
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discourages seeking full-time work. Finally, governments should help people find new jobs. That means
boosting support for training, tearing down barriers to opportunity such as unnecessary licensing rules, and
cutting payroll taxes to encourage hiring. As in normal times, governments must not stand in the way of
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economic change. They should instead grease its wheels—while offering a helping hand to those who are
left behind. ■
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According to an old joke, economists have predicted nine of the past five recessions. Those predicting the
demise of the EU may look similarly foolish. The bloc, its currency and its institutions are so central to much
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of European political life that unpicking them all would require a level of wanton destruction that not even
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the EU’s harshest critics have advocated. However after a decade of crises survivor bias afflicts the EU’s
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supporters and fresh thinking is urgently needed. An uncomfortable journey is justified if the destination is
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worthwhile. But without a clear answer to the question of what Europe stands for, the next decade or so
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The balance between safety and prosperity is perilous. As Eric Chaney of the Institut Montaigne, a think-
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tank, points out, chômage partiel (which covers 12.4m workers) has been the right policy to avoid lay-offs,
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“but creates the wrong incentives about returning to work”. The government now talks about gradually
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shifting the cost of the scheme to employers from June. Having played so well to French angoisse to impose
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confinement, the government may find it peculiarly hard to secure the trust needed to assuage those fears,
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CONTROLLING COVID-19 The Swedish way Sweden shunned a hard lockdown. Was that wise?
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536 words AS BLEARY-EYED Europeans squint in the sun, freshly released from coronavirus lockdowns,
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worries about a second wave of infections are on everybody’s mind. Life cannot return completely to
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normal until a vaccine is available. What sort of semi-normal life might work in the meantime is the big
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question. Sweden may hold the answer. In March, when governments across Europe seemed to be
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competing to impose the toughest anti-viral measures—from closing borders to forbidding people from
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venturing out even for a walk—Sweden resisted the temptation. It banned gatherings of more than 50
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people. But nurseries and schools for children under 16 have remained open (with older students tele-
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learning from home). Bars, restaurants and gyms also stayed open, though with social-distancing rules.
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People were asked to work from home if they could. And the elderly, who are most at risk of dying if
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infected, were told to stay at home to protect themselves. Sweden chose this path because it looked at the
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longer term, says Johan Giesecke, an epidemiologist advising the authorities. Full lockdowns are stop-gap
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measures, he says, and European governments rushed to put them in place without plans for what would
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replace them. Swedes have been sensible. Use of public transport has fallen significantly. A third of people
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say they avoid going to their workplace (by working from home, for example)—up from 10% in mid-March.
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Daily restaurant turnover fell by 70% in the month through April 22nd. Elisabeth Peters, who is 67 and lives
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on one of the islands off the west coast of Sweden, believes there has been a “huge change” in people’s
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behaviour, aligned with official advice. Some people are not seeing their grandchildren at all now, she says.
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When her children and grandchildren visit everyone stays outside all day and keeps at a distance from her
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and her husband. On first glance, Sweden seems to have paid a heavy price for choosing less stringent
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measures to keep people apart. By May 13th it had recorded 33 covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people, a rate
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more than three times that of Denmark and seven times higher than in Finland, which had shut schools and
restaurants in March. Even so, Sweden’s mortality rate has been much lower than that in Britain, France
and Spain. Swedes largely approve of their country’s approach, with two-thirds saying in polls that the
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government is handling the epidemic well. Time will tell whether Sweden chose a better strategy than other
countries, says Jussi Sane of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, because the costs of lockdowns—
in terms not only of economic damage but also harm to people’s mental health—are yet to be tallied.
European countries will see more covid-19 deaths when people start moving about, because the share of
those infected so far (and thus presumably immune, at least for some time) is still in the single digits. Mr
Giesecke reckons that Stockholm will reach “herd immunity”, the 40-60% rate of infection needed to halt
the spread of the coronavirus, by June. He thinks that when European countries count deaths a year from
now their figures will be similar, regardless of the measures taken and the numbers now. The economic
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damage in Sweden, however, may be smaller. ■
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BRITAIN’S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION
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How others see us
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At home and abroad, Britain’s handling of covid-19 is drawing unfavourable comparisons
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A SLIDE TRACKING Britain’s coronavirus death toll against other countries’ had been a fixture of the daily
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government press conference. When it was first produced, on March 30th, it showed the United Kingdom
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trailing Spain, Italy, France and America in a grisly league table. On May 9th, the last time it was displayed,
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Britain was the highest in Europe. It has now disappeared from the briefings. As The Economist went to
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press, the confirmed British death toll stood at 33,186, the second highest reported figure in the world
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behind America (see chart). Britain is fourth for fatalities as a share of population. On May 13th, Boris
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Johnson told the House of Commons that although the death count was “deeply, deeply horrifying”, it
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would be premature to make international comparisons until the figures of excess deaths were released,
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which would capture cases where covid-19 was not recorded as a cause of death. The Economist’s
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calculations of excess deaths per 100,000 people in Britain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and
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Sweden puts Britain at the top; data for America and Italy are not available. Britain is not alone in
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experiencing shortages of protective equipment, a deficient testing regime and uncontrolled outbreaks of
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the virus in care homes. It is too soon to say how far the death toll is attributable to government missteps,
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demography or geography. Yet to many foreign observers, Britain’s death toll serves as confirmation of
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deeper-rooted problems: a political culture of hubris and exceptionalism; atrophied public services;
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inequality and poor health. At home, the crisis has become a political risk for Mr Johnson. His
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announcement on May 10th of tentative steps to unwind the lockdown did not go well. Only a third of
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voters said they understood what the new “Stay alert, control the virus” slogan asked of them. Teachers’
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unions criticised plans to start to reopen schools on June 1st as unsafe. In London the Tube and some buses
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were busy, despite Mr Johnson’s plea for returning workers to avoid public transport. Mr Johnson’s poll
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ratings remain high, but have fallen back in recent weeks, and a poll by YouGov on May 12th showed Sir
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Keir Starmer, the Labour Party’s new leader, more popular than him. Voters still approve of the
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government’s handling of the crisis, by a net 12 points according to a survey released on May 9th by
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Opinium, a pollster. But the figure is down from 21 points two weeks earlier, and respondents increasingly
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think foreign governments have handled things better. In a poll published on April 25th they judged Britain’s
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government to have performed worse than those of China, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and
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Australia. By May 5th, Italy and Spain had joined that list. Only America gets lower marks of ten countries
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polled. Voters who supported Brexit tend to take a rosier view of Britain’s performance than Remainers,
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but both are becoming increasingly negative. Attitudes at home are reflected abroad. Chinese parents
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panicked on social media about children studying in a plague-ridden basket-case. But the Europeans are
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most vociferous. Coronavirus has reinforced unfavourable views formed during the Brexit saga. The British
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government’s early dismissal of lockdowns was seen as reminiscent of Mr Johnson’s disregard for the risks
of leaving the bloc. The German press has been particularly scathing. Süddeutsche Zeitung concluded that
unequal and unhealthy Britain made “a good breeding ground for the pandemic”. Poland’s government,
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which locked down early, cited Britain as a case study of what not to do. Scott Morrison, the Australian
prime minister, described the “herd immunity” strategy that Britain had initially favoured as a “death
sentence”. Mr Johnson’s election victory last year went some way towards restoring an image of stability
and competence after Theresa May’s chaotic attempt to negotiate Britain’s departure from the EU. Covid-
19 risks derailing that, and foreign policy hands worry about its impact on Britain’s reputation for good
governance. Expertise in public administration and fields such as global health has long been one of Britain’s
calling cards in international forums. New Zealand’s standing has been enhanced by its rapid elimination of
the outbreak. Mr Johnson’s decision to shun an EU scheme to procure medical kit collectively sent a blunt
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message about its appetite for co-operation after Brexit, according to Fabian Zuleeg, of the European Policy
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Centre, a think-tank in Brussels. Reputation is soft power, and big cheeses in the foreign-policy world worry
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about the impact on Britain’s ability to sway opinion. “During the Brexit process I was very struck by the
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decline in Britain’s authority,” says a former foreign secretary, noting particular dismay in Japan. “We
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weren’t treated as grown-ups.” Esteem for Britain is probably recoverable, says Michael Jay, a former head
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of the foreign office, but securing top international posts may be tricky for a while. Declinism is a national
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pastime in Britain, and some aspects of the country’s response have been impressive. The National Health
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Service has held up remarkably well, thanks to swift reorganisation. Mr Johnson is driving an international
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effort to produce a vaccine, and has pledged generous sums in support of it. Britain’s vast jobs rescue
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package, announced by Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, originally announced in March and extended until
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October on May 12th, compares favourably with schemes deployed elsewhere. Oxford University’s vaccine
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research programme is one of the world’s most advanced; success there, or in one of a series of British
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trials for antiviral therapies, would be a fillip for a battered government. But the recent knocks to Britain’s
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reputation will have consequences. “I would not want to be going around, as we all used to do, saying
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whatever its defects the British government system is one of the best in the world and other countries
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Crucial in slowing the early spread of covid-19 was the swift introduction of containment measures. Most
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African countries implemented lockdowns far earlier than rich countries did. By the end of April at least 42
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African countries had done so; 38 of these were in place for at least 21 days.
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SOCIAL MOBILITY Is zipcode destiny?

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681 words WASHINGTON, DC MOST AMERICANS worry that they live in an age of reduced social mobility.
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Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, has done as much as anyone to provide empirical heft for that malaise.
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pieced together an astonishing series of findings: that absolute mobility (the chance that a child will go on
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to earn more than their parents) has dropped from 90%, a near certainty, to 50%, a coin-toss; that the gap
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in life-expectancy between rich and poor has widened even as that between blacks and whites has
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narrowed; and that although the chances of upward mobility differ greatly from one neighbourhood to the
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next, in nearly every part of America the path for black boys is steeper. Mr Chetty has also compiled
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evidence that mobility (or immobility) depends a lot on the types of neighbourhood that Americans grow
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up in. Re-analysing the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which randomly assigned vouchers to
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poor families in five American cities to live in less poor places, he and his colleagues found dramatic effects
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for children who moved while young: a 32% higher chance of attending college and 31% higher earnings.
His research consortium has ranked neighbourhoods according to their chances of propelling poor children
upwards, publishing an online Opportunity Atlas. A new MTO-style experiment in Seattle is investigating
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these dynamics in real time. “It’s like Rousseau [in ‘The Social Contract’]: ‘Man is born free and everywhere
he is in chains.’ We just remove the chain of neighbourhood. And it’s not that simple,” says James Heckman,
an economist at the University of Chicago, who has grown critical of the research and the implications
drawn from it. Mr Heckman, who won a Nobel prize for work on teasing out cause and effect from messy,
real-world data, thinks there is more statistical uncertainty in the neighbourhood-mobility findings than is
widely recognised. A working paper by Magne Mogstad, another economist at the University of Chicago,
and his colleagues argues that the “noise”, or random fluctuation, in Mr Chetty’s data means “it is not
possible to draw firm conclusions about which counties in the United States have high or low values” of
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upward mobility from the poorest 25% of households. Mr Heckman acknowledges that there are clear
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differences in mobility according to neighbourhood. But the ultimate drivers could lie in family structure,
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parenting habits, exposure to crime or the quality of schooling. All these are difficult to derive from
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American tax-return data. Pundits take the research on “neighbourhood effects” as evidence that “zipcode
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is destiny”. Mr Heckman bristles at that. It overlooks the fact that Asians and black women do fairly well in
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mobility relative to whites. “It diverts attention away from other plausible explanations for why African-
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Americans are not doing well. Put discrimination on the table…but family structure is the one thing that is
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just off the table in American society,” he says. That topic has a history of descending into ugly spats about
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the personal culpability of the poor, which may ward off social scientists. Mr Heckman sees his own
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research—tracking long-term outcomes for children and parents randomly assigned to a high-quality early-
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learning scheme—as strong evidence that families can become more stable and that disadvantaged
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children can be helped without having to move. The point is not to yearn for a return to “shotgun
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marriages”, he says, but to encourage stable cohabiting relationships. This debate matters not just because
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two prominent economists disagree, but because they suggest different methods for tackling the urgent
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problem of intergenerational immobility. Mr Chetty’s experimental work on the primacy of place will be an
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important test of his theories, yet it also has a limit on its scale: every disadvantaged American plainly
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cannot be moved to opportunity. Mr Heckman’s project of encouraging early-childhood education has

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some scaling questions, too: could every child in America receive a programme as intensive as the ones he
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studies? For now, the answer, as with all messy scientific debates, is to let the experiments proceed. ■
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SEXUAL MORES IN TAIWAN Philanderers hold their breath The courts may decriminalise adultery 511 words
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TAIPEI IT IS AN odd mix. Taiwan is the only country in Asia to have legalised gay marriage (unless you count
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Australia and New Zealand). But it is also one of the few countries in Asia, along with conservative Muslim
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places such as Afghanistan and Brunei, where adultery remains a crime. From 2016 to 2019 the police
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investigated more than 10,000 people they suspected of philandering. More than 1,200 were convicted.
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The guilty all received fines, averaging 90,000 Taiwan dollars ($3,000). They could in theory have been jailed
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for up to a year. And many straying spouses end up with a criminal record. Worse, the weight of
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prosecutions falls largely on women. When husbands are caught cheating, some wives forgive them, but
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insist on pressing charges against the other woman. Cuckolded men, by contrast, tend to press charges
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against both their wives and their lovers. The result is that 54% of those convicted in recent years have
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been women. For other crimes in Taiwan, men earn roughly 80% of all convictions. The adultery law dates
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from 1935 and its age leads to further peculiarities. The term it uses for adultery—tongjian—has long been
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held by the courts to refer to vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman. It is not clear, therefore,
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whether the law applies to gay couples, says Shawn Tsai Ching-hsiang, the minister of justice. What is more,
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the narrow definition of the crime and the reluctance of courts to convict in the absence of clear proof have
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fostered a cottage industry: private investigators attempt to demonstrate not just that a married person
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has been having surreptitious trysts with someone of the opposite sex, but also that the pair have been
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having intercourse. The snoops have been known to wait outside hotel rooms listening for moans before
bursting in, camera in hand. A couple caught together in bed once escaped conviction, notes Kuan Hsiao-
wei of National Taipei University, by claiming they were just chatting, albeit naked. But it is worth scorned
33
spouses’ while to try to catch their partner in flagrante, since the threat of pressing charges can help secure
a more favourable divorce settlement. Despite all these flaws, Taiwanese seem to like the adultery law. A
poll conducted in 2017 by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation found that 69% of adults wanted to
keep it on the books. An earlier government survey found even stronger support for retaining the law. “In
Taiwanese society, everyone thinks a stable marriage and family is the foundation of social stability,” Mr
Tsai says. Nonetheless, several lower courts have asked the constitutional court to review the law. It heard
oral arguments on the subject on March 31st, and says it will announce a ruling at the end of May. The
court upheld the law as recently as 2002, but since then has issued a series of more liberal rulings. It was
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the court, for example, which ordered parliament to legalise gay marriage in 2017. Mr Tsai says the
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government is open-minded about the law’s future. The judges, however, are likely to be more categorical.
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There remain far too few such specialists to cope with China’s needs. The country has about two registered
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psychiatrists per 100,000 citizens, only about a sixth of the number in rich countries. Few Chinese have
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access to top-notch primary health care, so mild mental problems can go undetected until they are severe.
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Hospitals do not offer good care, either. Doctors often prescribe drugs, even when more subtle treatment,
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such as psychotherapy, might suffice. That is in part because they lack expertise and in part because it is
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more profitable to dispense pills.
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CRIME AND COVID-19

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The pandemic is providing organised crooks with fresh opportunities

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1671 words JOHANNESBURG, ROME AND SÃO PAULO KARACHI ISAMONG Asia’s most crime-ridden cities.
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And yet in eight days in March, after covid-19 forced it into lockdown, not a single car was reported stolen.
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El Salvador, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, enjoyed four homicide-free days in the
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same month. Many countries have reported tumbling crime rates, as crooks, along with everyone else,
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have shut themselves away. Italy was the first European country to lock down, on March 9th. Even before
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then, many people were working from home. The number of crimes reported in Italy between March 1st
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and March 22nd dropped by 64% compared with the same period in 2019. “I would not be surprised if
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crime statistics, which are dominated by less serious crimes like theft and various kinds of street crime,
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were to go down, at least temporarily,” says Jürgen Stock, secretary-general of Interpol, the world policing
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body. But government figures reflect only reported crime—and not all crime is reported, especially when
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lawbreaking, along with much else, has gone indoors. The Italian figures showed a drop of 44% in domestic
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violence. Police reckon that is because many victims dare not call to report assaults while their assailants
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are within earshot. Meanwhile Gun Violence Archive, an NGO based in Washington, DC, counted more than
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2,000 deaths by shooting in America between March 1st and April 19th—a 6% increase over the average in
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the same period during the past three years. That echoes what happened in the 1918-19 flu pandemic.
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According to Barry Latzer, an emeritus professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York,
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murders in 1918 increased in each of the five worst-affected states. Sheltering in place shortens tempers.
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It also makes it easier for gangsters to locate enemies and rivals. Most worrying, says Mr Stock, is the
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potential for covid-19 to create the ideal conditions for the spread of serious, organised crime. The
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pandemic is encouraging organised criminals to put old skills to new use. The global economic depression
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that looks likely to follow will offer them a chance to extend their reach deep into the legitimate economy.
“The potential for problems arising from this is without precedent,” frets another international law-
enforcement official. New scams are already proliferating, some ingeniously simple. On March 16th the
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South African Reserve Bank issued a statement denying that it had sent collectors house-to-house to
recover banknotes in case they had been contaminated with covid-19. Sales of counterfeit, often
substandard, drugs have surged. In March Operation Pangaea, co-ordinated by Interpol and involving police
forces in 90 countries, led to more than 100 arrests worldwide and the seizure of potentially dangerous
pharmaceuticals worth more than $14m. Brazilian drugs gangs short of cash are robbing more banks.
Meanwhile the urgent need for personal protective equipment (PPE) has opened up a new field for
ineffective, overpriced or even non-existent goods. Two factors have helped the criminals: the waiving of
normal procurement controls by governments desperate to protect their health workers; and the
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impossibility of arranging face-to-face meetings between customers and suppliers. In the most elaborate
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scam so far, a group of fraudsters succeeded in getting the authorities in Germany’s most populous region,
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North Rhine-Westphalia, to part with €2.4m ($2.6m). The money was a down-payment for 10m masks.
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More than 50 vehicles were lined up to import the fictitious masks from the Netherlands before the ruse
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was discovered. It involved a website registered in Spain, an intermediary in Ireland and a firm in the
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Netherlands with a website that turned out to have been cloned by the scammers. With the help of financial
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institutions in three countries, investigators managed to block the payments, including €500,000 on its way
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to Nigeria. Making out like (masked) bandits That attempted sting reflects an explosion in cybercrime since
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the lockdowns began. On the night of March 12th the Czech Republic’s second-largest hospital, the
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University Hospital in Brno, was hit by a ransomware attack (in which the target is prevented from accessing
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files until a payment is made). Urgent surgical operations had to be postponed and patients redirected to
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other hospitals. Several other medical facilities have experienced similar attacks since the start of the covid-
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19 emergency, according to Interpol. But more traditional organised criminal activities have been
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hampered by the lockdowns. Protection rackets, prostitution rings, illegal gambling and the drugs trade all
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depend on people being able to move around freely. So do imprisoned bosses of organised crime groups if
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they are to continue to control their businesses. This is a particular challenge for the Brazilian drugs gangs,
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many of whose leaders are jailed. Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor for the state of São Paulo, says visiting family
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members often convey notes and information. Now incarcerated bosses have to rely on infrequent
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appearances by their lawyers to communicate with their subordinates. Extortion provides many criminal
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groups with a regular flow of cash. It is especially important to the street gangs, or maras, of Central
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America. But collecting cash during a pandemic is tricky. Data quoted by the Global Initiative against
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Transnational Organised Crime comparing March 2020 with the same month last year showed 9% and 17%
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falls in extortion incidents registered by police in Guatemala and El Salvador (though most are not
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reported). In Honduras the decline was 80%. According to the FNAMP, an anti-gang unit in the country,
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Honduran gang leaders have warned transport firms that once the quarantine ends, protection money will
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have to be paid retrospectively. The biggest money-spinner for most organised crooks is the drugs trade.
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Mr Stock says early reports suggest the global business, estimated at around $500bn, has been disrupted—
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but only temporarily and partially. “For many cartels and syndicates it’s not a big problem”, he explains,
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“because of the money that is available at that level. They have immense liquidity.” The opium harvest in
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Afghanistan that supplies nearly all the world’s heroin has been largely unaffected. Coca farmers in
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Colombia, the world’s largest cultivator, have just had their best year on record, though in Peru a shortage
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of imported chemical precursors has made it harder to produce cocaine. The closure of pharmaceutical
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plants in China threatened the supply of precursors used in the production of methamphetamines, but the
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interruption was temporary. The next stage in the supply chain—wholesale distribution—has been
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distorted. But gangs are already adapting. Syndicates that rely on drugs smuggled on flights, such as
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Nigerian gangs in South Africa, have been hit hard. Two members of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel told Reuters
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that far fewer drugs are being transported in cars across the border into the United States since it was shut
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on March 21st. Syndicates seem to be using tunnels and drones instead. Officials in Brazil have reported
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that traffickers in cocaine, which enters from Colombia and Peru on its way to Europe and Africa, are
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switching consignments from land routes and onto boats travelling down the Amazon. With maritime and
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air traffic greatly diminished, it is even harder to get drugs out of Brazil. Yet seizures between February and
April were up by 10%. Elvis Secco of the Brazilian Federal Police’s drugs and organised crime unit says
traffickers are offloading their stockpiles and taking more risks, which partly explains why more narcotics
35
are being impounded. Cocaine prices in Europe and America have risen accordingly. But that also reflects
the difficulties of retail distribution, the link in the supply chain that has probably had to be adjusted most.
In Naples last month police dogs found 89 packages stuffed with narcotics waiting to be dispatched from a
courier depot. The drugs had been ordered on the darknet. The courier firm had no idea of its role. Shortly
afterwards Interpol told its 194 members that drug-dealers were also using the cover of food deliveries to
sell their wares. In Ireland police found 8kg of cocaine and two handguns hidden in pizza boxes. In the Cape
Flats, a sprawl of townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, gangs are delivering drugs along with food
parcels. Heroin prices there rose initially because of a mix of profiteering and new delivery fees (they have
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now returned to normal). In Lesotho getting heroin direct to your door costs 200-500 rand ($11-27), on top
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of the usual 1,200 rand per gram. The Cape Town gangs are among several around the world that are
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making a big show of charity during the pandemic. Mobsters have been reported delivering food to the
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needy in Mexico and Italy. In El Salvador and Brazil they have enforced curfews. In Japan yakuza have
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offered to disinfect a quarantined cruise liner. But even where such initiatives are not used as a cover for
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drug peddling, their effects are anything but benign. They enhance gangsters’ popularity and image as
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latter-day Robin Hoods. They guarantee future votes for the politicians whom mobsters sponsor. And they
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realise one of the fundamental aims of a true mafia: delegitimising the state by displacing official authority.
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A gang that enforces a lockdown is doing the job of the police; one that distributes food to the destitute,
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that of government welfare bodies. A deep or prolonged depression will open up rich opportunities for
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crooks in at least three areas. High unemployment will make it easier for mobsters to recruit people.
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Government recovery schemes will give them a chance to muscle in on juicy public contracts. And lower
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corporate profits will make it easier for mafias to take over businesses that can then be used to launder
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illicit gains. In Italy, after the financial crisis, some firms accepted loans at below-market rates in return for
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taking onto the books—or the board—a mafioso who then began to give the orders. According to the chief
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of the Italian police, Franco Gabrielli, his officers in the regions worst hit by covid-19 have already come
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across men carrying cash-stuffed briefcases that may be part of the Italian mafias’ version of “helicopter
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money”. The risk is that politicians already struggling to cope with the effects of the pandemic will shove
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its implications for the underworld to the back of their minds and the bottom of their agendas. ■
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FROM SECONDS TO CENTURIES

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The damage done by climate change will be severe, widespread and sometimes surprising
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1569 words ON NOVEMBER 21ST 2016, a line of thunderstorms passed through the Australian state of
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Victoria. By the end of the following day, it had sent 3,000 people to hospital. Storms typically hurt people
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by blowing down buildings, flooding streets or setting fires. In this case, though, the casualties were caused
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by asthma. Late that afternoon a peculiarly powerful downdraft generated by the storm front pushed a
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layer of cold air thick with pollen, dust and other particles through Melbourne. The city’s ambulance service
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was swamped within hours. At least ten people died. The risks that weather and climate pose to human life
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are not always as specific to the peculiar circumstances of time and place as that sudden-onset asthma
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epidemic. But they are complex functions of what, where and who, and their mechanisms are not always
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easily discerned. What is more, they can interact with each other. For example, if the southern spring of
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2016 had not brought weather particularly well suited to the growth of allergenic grasses, would that
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stormy afternoon have been so catastrophic? Such complexities mean that a gradual change to the climate
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can lead to sudden changes in the impacts on human beings when things pass a certain threshold. And that
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threshold will not necessarily be discernible in advance. Not all the ways in which today’s weather harms
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people will be exacerbated by climate change. But research suggests that many of them will. Most of the
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problems people have with weather and climate come from extremes. When means shift a little, extremes
can shift a lot (see chart). Today’s rare extremes become tomorrow’s regular disturbances; tomorrow’s
extremes are completely new. How damaging these impacts will be to the economic and physical welfare
36
of humankind depends on how much warming takes place and how well people adapt—both of which are
currently unknowable. But it is possible to get a qualitative sense of what they could mean by looking at
the range of timescales over which they operate. At one end, a thunderstorm’s pollen surge, sweeping by
in minutes; at the other, sea-level rise which could last longer than any civilisation in human history. In
terms of short-lived events, the worst sort of bad day that the world’s weather can offer is generally taken
to be the one on which you get hit by a tropical cyclone, which is why hurricanes (as they are known in the
Atlantic) and typhoons (as they are known in some other places) have become so heated a part of the
arguments about climate change. A single hurricane can do more than $100bn in damage, as Harvey did
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when it hit Houston in August 2017, or kill thousands, as Maria did the following month in Puerto Rico.
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Tropical cyclones can only form over a sea or ocean with a surface temperature of 27°C or more. The area
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where such temperatures are possible will definitely increase with warming. But that does not mean
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hurricanes will become more common. Their formation also requires that the wind be blowing at a similar
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speed close to the surface and at greater altitudes—and this condition, models say, will become less
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common in future over many of the places where hurricanes spawn. Thus models do not predict a great
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increase in the number of tropical cyclones; Atlantic hurricanes may well become more rare. But more heat
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in the oceans means that those tropical cyclones which do get going are more likely to become intense.
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There is thus broad agreement among experts that the proportion of hurricanes which reach category four
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or five looks set to increase. So, too, does the rainfall associated with them, because warmer air holds more
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moisture. Studies of the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey suggest that warming due to climate change
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increased its rainfall by about 15%. Extreme rainfall events of many sorts increase in warmer worlds. The
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heat which powers hurricanes at sea can, on land, kill directly. Humans cool themselves by sweating, a
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process that becomes less effective the more humid the atmosphere. Combining the heat and the humidity
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into something called the wet-bulb temperature (WBT) allows scientists to measure temperatures in a way
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that reflects that difficulty (similar measures in America are called the heat index). WBTs of 35°C and above
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are lethal. Until recently it was thought that WBTs that high would not be seen until warming had continued
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for decades. A review of weather-station data from 1979 on, however, shows that for very brief periods
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local WBTs almost that high are already being experienced occasionally in South-East Asia, the Persian Gulf
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and the coastal south-west of America, and that their frequency had doubled since 1979. With 2.5°C (4.5°F)
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of global warming above pre-industrial levels, which is quite possible in the second half of this century if
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action on emissions is not significantly increased, these unliveable conditions will become a regular
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occurence in parts of the humid subtropics. Another recent study defines climates which people find
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liveable according to where, historically, they have lived, and then sees which such areas move beyond
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those climatic bounds as the world warms. Temperature rises quite plausible by 2070 would see many areas
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where people live today develop climates unlike any that people have lived in before (see map). Some
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econometric analyses based on interannual differences suggests that, in general, higher temperatures lead
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to lower labour productivity and more violence. In the nearer term, there is an increased likelihood of
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heatwaves. Between August 3rd and 16th 2003, Europe saw 39,000 more deaths than would have been
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expected on the basis of previous years. The excess mortality was due to a summer that was hotter, by
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some estimates, than any for the previous 500 years. Modelling suggests that, even in 2003, climate change
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had made such a heatwave at least twice as likely. Extreme heatwaves are becoming more frequent not
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only because temperatures are climbing. Warming-induced changes in the climate system can weaken the
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processes that normally move weather around the world, allowing conditions to get stuck. Such stalling can
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be the difference between a hot week and a lethal month, or in winter a cold snap and a deep freeze.
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Springtime and harvest Hot summers can also harm crops, both directly—many important crops are very
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sensitive to temperatures above a certain threshold—and through water stress. Milder winters can also do
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harm by allowing pests to survive, hurting yields. When unusually hot and dry conditions suck the moisture
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off the land, the subsequent droughts do not just exacerbate the problems for farmers. They also increase
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the risk and severity of fires—which an increase in the amount of lightning will, in some regions, spark off
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more frequently. This is an issue not just in warm, fire-prone places such as Australia. For several months
in the summer of 2019, large swathes of northern Russian and Canadian forest—and even some of
Greenland’s few woodlands—went up in flames. Unusual infernos have plagued California for many years
37
now, again as a result of parched conditions, which are drying out rivers, lakes and underground aquifers
across the entire south-west of the state. This is no regular drought. It is 19 years in the making, enough for
it to be classed as a “megadrought”. Tree-ring records show only four such in the region over the past 1,200
years, and suggest that this could be as bad as the worst of them, which took place in the 17th century.
Such droughts are linked to changing patterns of circulation in the ocean. Models suggest that such patterns
are themselves altered by warming, which can thus change the frequency of other large-scale regional shifts
in the climate. And then there is the longest term change: sea level. The sea’s rise comes from three
different mechanisms—the expansion of the oceans as they absorb more heat, the addition of meltwater
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from shrinking glaciers on land, and the physical break down of ice sheets such as those on Antarctica and
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Greenland. The first two factors are currently driving an increase of about 1cm every three years, and are
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set to do so at a similar rate well into the 21st century even if global warming is held well below 2°C; the
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time it takes seawater to warm up gives the process a significant inertia. Such rises will erode coasts and
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increase flooding—especially when pushed inland by the surges intense storms produce. The big unknown,
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though, once you get to the century time scale, is the stability of the great ice sheets. It is widely believed
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that there are points of no return after which such sheets are doomed slowly to collapse, thus increasing
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sea levels by many metres. Where these points of no return are is not clear. It is possible that they might
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be passed even if warming is kept to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial. A high likelihood of drought and crop
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failures; changes to regional climate that upset whole economies; storms more destructive in both their
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winds and their rains; seawater submerging beaches and infiltrating aquifers: what is known about the
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impacts of climate change is already worrying enough. The known unknowns add to the anxiety. It is not
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just the question of the ice sheets, an uncertainty massive enough to weigh down a continent. There are
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other tipping points, too, which could see ocean currents shift, or deserts spread. And in the spaces
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between all these troubles are the unknown unknowns, as surprising, and deadly, as a thunderstorm that
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BARTLEBY
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Teachable moment
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The pandemic may result in some business schools closing for good
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725 words
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LOCKDOWN HAS delivered a nasty shock to academia, with universities around the world closing for the
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summer term, disrupting the plans of millions of students. Business schools are suffering along with the
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rest, but the shutdown has occurred when the sector is already facing a host of problems. A survey of the
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deans of American business schools by Eduvantis, a consultancy, found that almost all thought the
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pandemic would lead to permanent closures. Bartleby contacted seven leading schools in America, Britain
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and France to see how they were coping with the crisis. Unsurprisingly, the immediate reaction has been
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to switch to teaching online. Many are putting a brave face on the issue. Christoph Loch, dean of the Judge
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school at Cambridge, says: “If we do this right, if we do it strategically, this is going to stay beyond covid.”
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Meanwhile the INSEAD school in France maintains that it is hard to imagine going back to a world where
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the successes from online learning will not be combined with person-to-person exchanges. The pandemic
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also presents a teaching opportunity. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has launched
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a course called “Epidemics, Natural Disasters and Geopolitics: Managing Global Business and Financial
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Uncertainty”. The London Business School will shortly run a course on “The Economics of a Pandemic”.
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Online courses are all very well. But part of the motivation for attending business school is to take
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advantage of networking opportunities that could last for the rest of students’ careers. Some of this can be
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done online. At the MIT Sloan School of Management, virtual student networking has included trivia nights,
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hackathons and a programming boot camp. In keeping with its location, activities at the Haas School in
Berkeley, California, have included remote yoga and mindfulness classes. At INSEAD, students gather in
virtual break-out rooms for further discussions, with the groups picked at random to ensure interaction
38
with a broader group of classmates. Nevertheless, just as a friend you made on Facebook is not the same
as someone you grew up with, virtual ties are unlikely to be as strong as normal ones. That has led to some
dissatisfaction among students. At Wharton, more than 1,000 MBA students have signed an online petition
arguing that the school should reduce fees, which run to $150,000 for a two-year course. The petition claims
that virtual-classroom technology is “unable to fully replicate” the usual teaching environment, and that
other elements of the course, such as foreign travel and extra-curricular activities, “have been essentially
cancelled”. The rapid economic downturn caused by the pandemic is a complicating factor. In the past,
business schools have benefited from recessions, as young people have chosen to continue their education
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rather than risk entering a shaky jobs market. But this time could be different. First, it is not yet clear when
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business schools can reopen for traditional teaching. None of the schools had a firm timetable for that to
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happen. And candidates may wait until they do, rather than pay top dollar for an online course. Another
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survey, by Poets&Quants, a website for news about business schools, found that 43% of prospective MBA
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students thought that fees should be lowered, and that a third might defer their courses until normal
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teaching can resume. Second, the pandemic is likely further to discourage students from applying to
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business schools abroad. Around half of all American business schools experienced a decline in overseas
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applications last year, thanks to anti-immigration political rhetoric and the greater difficulty in getting visas
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to work once a degree was obtained. Neither America nor Britain has covered itself in glory in recent weeks.
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A survey of international students by IDP Connect found that, among Anglophone countries, Britain and
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America ranked behind New Zealand, Canada and Australia in terms of how they have handled the
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pandemic. The war of words between America and China over the virus will also have an effect. Students
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from the People’s Republic may be more inclined to study in their own country. That is bad news for both
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universities and business schools, as international students are very lucrative. Things may go back to normal
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in a few years’ time; the virus may be conquered and international relations may settle down. But as with
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But even with the best ideas in the world, first-time entrepreneurs will struggle to convince investors to
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give them capital in the depths of the crisis, not least if they can only pitch to them over Zoom. Instead, the
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more likely standard-bearers of creative destruction will be existing firms, albeit small ones, which raised
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enough money before the crisis to survive it and will maintain their flair for innovation throughout, says
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Daniele Archibugi of Birkbeck, University of London.

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Yet it is not just small, scrappy firms that push innovation forward. Big firms have a critical role to play, too.
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Alongside creative destruction in times of crisis, Schumpetarian academics point to “creative accumulation”
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in economic upswings, when incremental innovation is carried out in the research-and-development labs
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of giant firms. In Europe during the global financial crisis such corporations increased investment into new
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products and ideas, as did the most innovative small firms. The cash-rich tech giants, such as Microsoft,
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Amazon, Apple and Alphabet, have become examples of creative accumulation, helping foster innovation
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during the good times. They will probably continue to do so during the crisis. As they expand into health
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care, fintech and other industries, they could even be part of a new wave of creative destruction. That is
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the optimist’s scenario. A more pessimistic one is that big tech will use its moneybags and muscle to stifle
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competition, by buying or scaring off more enterprising rivals. What is in little doubt, though, is that the
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covid-19 crisis, which has turned so many people’s lives upside down, will eventually produce a wealth of
new business opportunities. If it attracts swarms of entrepreneurs crawling over cosy oligopolies so much
39
the better. But even if the tech titans prevail for now, they will inevitably find themselves victims of the
forces of change. Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction”
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Yet it is not just small, scrappy firms that push innovation forward. Big firms have a critical role to play, too.
Alongside creative destruction in times of crisis, Schumpetarian academics point to “creative accumulation”
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in economic upswings, when incremental innovation is carried out in the research-and-development labs
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of giant firms. In Europe during the global financial crisis such corporations increased investment into new
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products and ideas, as did the most innovative small firms. The cash-rich tech giants, such as Microsoft,
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Amazon, Apple and Alphabet, have become examples of creative accumulation, helping foster innovation
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during the good times. They will probably continue to do so during the crisis. As they expand into health
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care, fintech and other industries, they could even be part of a new wave of creative destruction. That is
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the optimist’s scenario. A more pessimistic one is that big tech will use its moneybags and muscle to stifle
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competition, by buying or scaring off more enterprising rivals. What is in little doubt, though, is that the
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covid-19 crisis, which has turned so many people’s lives upside down, will eventually produce a wealth of
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new business opportunities. If it attracts swarms of entrepreneurs crawling over cosy oligopolies so much
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the better. But even if the tech titans prevail for now, they will inevitably find themselves victims of the
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forces of change. Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction” will one day blow them away, too.
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GLOBALISATION
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Torn apart
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Pre-existing conditions have exacerbated covid-19’s blow to world trade

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1923 words WASHINGTON, DC THE 2010S WERE not a happy decade for proponents of global trade. Though
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fears of an increase in protectionism following the financial crisis of 2007-09 did not materialise, nor did
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the growth of the 1990s and 2000s re-establish itself. Finance was tamer; China was richer and developing
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its internal market; transport was no longer getting cheaper. As a share of global GDP, neither global trade,
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foreign direct investment, nor stocks of cross-border bank lending returned to their 2000s peak. And then,
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belatedly, fears about protectionism came good with the election of President Donald Trump. In 2018 he
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launched a trade war against China; he applied tariffs in the name of national security; his administration
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hog-tied the World Trade Organisation’s appellate court. Optimists might have seen the 2020s getting off
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to a slightly better start. The “Phase One” deal between America and China, signed on January 15th, left
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tariffs six times higher than they had been before Mr Trump launched his trade war. But at least it seemed
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a step in the right direction. The covid-19 pandemic has since, by curtailing trade across the Pacific, made
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it very hard to see how China can increase its imports from America in line with the Phase One deal’s
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requirements. But that is the least of the trading world’s worries. The United Nations Conference on Trade
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and Development is predicting that covid-19 will reduce flows of foreign direct investment by 30-40%; the
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World Bank expects remittances to fall by 20%; the WTO reckons trade could fall by as much as a third.
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Much of this carnage is because of crashing demand, not new barriers to trade. But the crisis has not made
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international commerce any easier. Travel bans, quarantines and a widespread desire to stay at home even
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among those not ordered to do so means that the movement of individuals from place to place, the one
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aspect of globalisation that had continued from strength to strength, came to a juddering halt. Fewer
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passengers means fewer planes means less room for air freight. In a forecast of covid-related costs made
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this April, the WTO took into account higher air-cargo prices, extra time spent in transit for goods having to
go through more stringent border checks, and travel restrictions making trade in services and the delivery
of equipment that needs bespoke installation more difficult. Overall, the WTO thinks the rise in costs could
40
be equivalent to a 3.4% global tariff. For comparison, in 2018 the global average tariff was around 8%. As
firms have foundered, fears have mounted that foreign state-supported companies will swoop in and snap
them up. The European Commission has urged member states to be “particularly vigilant” in making sure
businesses are not sold off. The German, Italian and Spanish governments have all tightened their processes
for screening foreign investment. The Australian government is requiring that all foreign investments be
approved by the Foreign Investment Review Board. India has enacted new restrictions, too; China calls
them “discriminatory”. Around the world, governments responsive to their people are concerned with little
more than keeping them something close to safe and solvent. Meeting the needs of the public is taken to
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mean being able to provide for them independently. Kevin O’Rourke of NYU Abu Dhabi sees a parallel with
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the period which came immediately after the second world war. Policy was neither being driven by
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corporate interests seeking protection from foreign competitors, nor by a calamitous attempt to impose
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capital controls, but rather voters’ desire for safety. It is a powerful justification for protective measures.
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Let me down easy Take medical supplies. In 2018 China alone supplied about 42% of the world’s exports of
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personal protective equipment. Almost three-quarters of Italy’s imported blood thinners come from China;
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so do 60% of the ingredients for antibiotics imported by Japan. Such dependence on any country seems
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unwise. Such dependence on China, which has been known to abuse its market dominance, seems idiotic.
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Smaller, poorer countries have little choice but to build stockpiles. But the bigger, richer countries and blocs
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are thinking of ways to shake up the status quo. On April 27th Bernd Lange, head of the European
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Parliament’s Committee on International Trade, suggested that requirements could be imposed on
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companies to source certain intermediate products from several countries, or to develop strategic
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agreements with companies for their assembly lines to change quickly in a crisis. Alternatively, the EU could
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create a list of strategic goods for which European production would be required. Mr Trump’s trade adviser,
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Peter Navarro, is clearly itching to set procurement rules which would force health-care providers to buy
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American-made products. Mr Trump’s administration is reportedly also trying to remedy what it sees as a
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strategic vulnerability by convincing Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, two
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companies on the frontiers of chipmaking, to build new factories in America. A survey of members of the
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Global Business Alliance, a group of companies with investments in America, published on May 11th,
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revealed that 77% expected the country to become more protectionist in terms of cross-border mergers
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and acquisitions, government procurement and trade because of the pandemic. Those businesses, and
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their peers, are currently in crisis-management mode. When the dust gets to settling, they have some
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reconfiguring to do. Adjusting their supply chains will probably accelerate the trend towards
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regionalisation, particularly in complex cases where assemblies cross borders repeatedly. This will have the
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knock-on effect, desired by some, of reducing the centrality of China. Take regionalisation first. In the
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automotive supply chain, which stretches from the leather for seats to the chips for dashboard displays,
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59% of trade is already intraregional. Such integration is self-reinforcing; it becomes increasingly easy, and
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enticing, to replace suppliers farther afield with ones nearer to hand. Comparing the second half of 2019
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with the second half of 2017, China’s share of car parts imported by the United States fell by 2.2 percentage
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points. The share coming from elsewhere in North America increased by 2.8 percentage points (see chart).
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What works for cars, though, does not work for everything. Near-shoring imports of furniture, toys and
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clothes may not be worth the fuss. As China’s (sizeable) share in America’s imports of clothing, toys and
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furniture fell between 2017 and 2019, North America’s barely budged. Drops in electronics imports from
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China were offset not by suppliers closer to home, but mostly by other Asian countries. That demonstrates
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the other strategy companies are developing: globalisation with fewer Chinese characteristics. Last October
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a survey of American multinationals found that around 40% were either considering or in the process of
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relocating manufacturing or sourcing outside of China. A more recent survey suggested that 24% were
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planning to adjust their sourcing outside of China as a result of covid-19. For some companies, this is not a
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straightforward retrenchment, but an embrace of what is known as “China+1”. The strategy is still to use
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Chinese suppliers, not least so as to go on serving the very attractive Chinese market, but also to encourage
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suppliers elsewhere in case something goes wrong. Witness Google’s reported investment in Vietnam to
produce its Pixel smartphone or Microsoft’s to produce its Surface tablet. The strategy’s purported benefits,
though, are not bought cheaply, argues Jake Parker of the US-China Business Council, a lobby group. It will
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take five years for any such reconfigured supply chain to achieve costs as low as what they would have
been if based in China. In the meantime prices will have to rise. In the longer run, and once companies have
more cash to spare, it is possible that they will attempt to set up new clusters of production. Mike Jette of
GEP, a supply chain consultancy, reports hearing from some electronics manufacturers that they want to
get 30-40% of their supply chain within the same region as the customer, leaving around half in China. If
the customer is in Asia, that will be fairly easy. If the customer is elsewhere, it will be harder. Their historical
and geographic ties give the nexus of Asian electronics suppliers a huge advantage over comparatively
isolated firms elsewhere, even if customers are actively trying to encourage the challengers. The Asian
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advantage will be hard to dislodge. To the extent that companies do go looking for new secure sources of
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supply, they will keep in mind how countries have responded to covid-19. Kristin Dziczek of the Centre for
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Automotive Research says that the Mexican government’s haphazard approach to the pandemic generated
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huge uncertainty for car companies, and raised questions about their reliance on the country as a supplier.
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Rise of the robots Such concerns will be weighed against countries’ other advantages, such as trade deals,
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existing sophisticated manufacturing capacity, and competitive labour costs. In Mexico’s case, an incoming
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trade deal with America and Canada will increase the incentives to source car parts from within the region.
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Pierre Sauvé of the World Bank reckons that deals with America and/or the European Union mean that the
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likes of Colombia, Costa Rica, Morocco and Tunisia could also gain from shifting supply chains, as could
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Malaysia and Vietnam, which enjoy broad, well-established trade ties with Japan and Korea. Such countries
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need not limit themselves to whittling away at China’s manufacturing role. Trying to supply digital services
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could be a better long-run strategy—one that the pandemic may be making easier. White-collar workers
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have just been jolted into a mostly digital existence. If managers get used to supervising staff remotely, why
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should they not get used to managing more overseas? Employers will be keen on cost savings after the
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shutdown, notes Richard Baldwin, who works at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. That said, trade is not
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the only way to realise savings. Bernard Hoekman of the European University Institute warns that
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companies may choose to automate services rather than to offshore them. The same warning applies, in
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reverse, to people hoping that reshoring production brings back jobs. It may do if you are an engineer. It
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will not if you wait tables. As defenders of the status quo try to explain that strength lies in openness, and
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critics crow about globalisation going too far, the reality is that both will probably get their way. The medical
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and pharmaceutical sectors should expect pressure to localise more of their production in those countries
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that have enough clout to apply it. Those Chinese companies hoping to take advantage of the global market
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in ideas will find it harder to access. Foreign acquisitions will be treated with suspicion. American scrutiny
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of their suppliers will make international commerce harder. But once companies can start investing again
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many will continue to set up their supply chains in such a way as to chase the next source of growth—
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mindful, of course, of governments prone to placing obstacles between them and their favoured suppliers.
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It is something global business knows how to do pretty well (see next story). “If I were advising Davos man,
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I would advise him to keep quiet and take it on the chin,” says Mr O’Rourke, adding that his study of history
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has taught him the benefits of moderation in all things. That return to the norm could be impeded if political
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leaders see the public desire for security as requiring an all-out assault on what went before. “It was clear
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that this kind of globalisation was ending its cycle,” Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, recently
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told the Financial Times in a disquisition on the lessons of the covid-19 pandemic and the retrenchment it
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might bring. If so, better for the world to start a new, rebalanced cycle, less centred on a single dominant
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A closer look yields some grounds for optimism.

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FREE EXCHANGE The great levelling
Although the poorest have so far been hardest hit, the pandemic could eventually lower inequality
1003 words
FOR AMERICA’S poor, the covid-19 pandemic has delivered a swift and brutal reversal of fortune. At the
start of the year unemployment was plumbing new lows. Years of wage growth for low-income workers
had healed some of the scars left by the global financial crisis. Already by 2016, the most recent year for
which figures are available, the economic expansion had produced a smaller rise in American income
inequality, after taxes and transfers, than any expansion since the early 1980s. Between 2016 and 2019 the
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weekly earnings of low- and middle-income workers grew at an annual average pace of 3.8%. Since covid-
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19 struck, however, a host of economic statistics—and legions of pundits—have pointed to a resurgence in
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inequality. Yet if history is a guide, the pandemic could eventually render the distribution of income more
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egalitarian. There are many reasons why the well-heeled might suffer less in the pandemic. Much of the
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plunge in asset prices that occurred in March has since been retraced. In places like New York City and Los
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Angeles, covid-19 seems to have hit poorer neighbourhoods harder. Low-wage earners are often less able
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to work from home or maintain social distancing. Interruptions to schooling widen the gaps in achievement
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between children from richer backgrounds and those from poorer families. Meanwhile, workers on the
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lower rungs of the income ladder have borne the brunt of job losses. America’s unemployment rate rose
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by roughly ten percentage points, to 14.7%, in April—the highest since the Depression. The jobless rate for
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workers with a college education went up by nearly six percentage points, to 8.4%; that for workers without
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a high-school diploma leapt by just over 14 percentage points, to 21.2%. A new paper published by the
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Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago reinforces the point. Between February and April,
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find its authors, employment among workers in the top fifth of the income distribution dropped by 9%. In
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the bottom fifth, by contrast, it plunged by 35%. Were the crisis of unemployment to end as swiftly as it
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began, the effects of these uneven job losses on inequality would be limited, and fleeting. Many jobless
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workers are earning more in unemployment benefits than they did on the job, thanks to a top-up of $600
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per week enacted by Congress in March. Of the more than 20m Americans who were out of work in April,
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78% were reported to be temporarily laid off. But the danger is that temporary job losses become
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permanent. The authors of the Becker Friedman paper calculate that active employment—or the number
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of workers counted on payrolls—declined by 14% between February and April. About 40% of that fall
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occurred at firms that had ceased operations, at least temporarily. Not all will reopen. A new working paper
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by Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University
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and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago is similarly gloomy, concluding that 42% of pandemic-related
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job losses will be permanent. Meanwhile, the crush of claimants has overwhelmed some state governments
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and slowed the flow of unemployment aid. Top-up benefits are due to expire in July, when millions will still
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be jobless. The most vulnerable workers are therefore likely to be squeezed hard by the recession. But if
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history is a guide, those at the top of the income distribution could yet face a reckoning. Disruptive global
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events have often precipitated shifts towards a more equal distribution of income and wealth. In his
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influential book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Thomas Piketty points out that high levels of
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inequality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were reduced by the calamitous events of the period
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from 1914 to 1945. In that time the share of income earned by America’s top 1%, for instance, dropped
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from 19% to 14%. The combination of depression, war, inflation and taxes compressed incomes and laid
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waste to vast fortunes. Walter Scheidel, a historian, goes further still in his book on long-run inequality,
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“The Great Leveller”. Since antiquity, he argues, only four forces have ever managed to reduce inequality
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in a sustained way: war, revolution, state failure and pandemic. (The troubles often coincide: a pandemic
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contributed to the failure of the Roman empire; another coincided with the end of the first world war.) Past
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crises are a far cry from today’s difficulties. The Black Death compressed income gaps by dramatically
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reducing the ratio of workers to arable land. Even in the worst possible case, covid-19 will kill far fewer than
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the 30-60% of Europeans felled by bubonic plague. Stockmarkets could plunge again, but it is very unlikely
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that they will match the collapse of nearly 90% that took place between 1929 and 1932. Yet some
comparisons can still be made. The debts racked up by governments during this pandemic will in some
cases reach heights last seen during the world wars. When governments eventually balance the books—
43
and especially if they reduce debt burdens via taxation, financial repression or debt restructuring—the
wealthy could find themselves footing the bill. Time for a redeal Furthermore, the crisis could have indirect
effects that influence the trajectory of inequality. In a critique of Mr Piketty’s arguments published in 2017
Marshall Steinbaum, now of the University of Utah, argued that the wars and the Depression of the 20th
century mainly led to greater egalitarianism by discrediting ruling elites and the regressive policies that had
enabled the rises in inequality in the first place. That created space for social democracy to bloom.
Inequality fell not only because of higher taxes but also because of extensions to the welfare state. History
need not repeat itself. Governments and economic systems of all kinds have struggled to manage the
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pandemic effectively and equitably. But it does not take much imagination to see that if politicians allow
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the costs of the pandemic to be borne unequally they could sow the seeds of a transformative populist
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backlash. They would do well to heed the lessons of the past. ■
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WHAT TO WATCH Coup de théâtre Catch up on the finest French television dramas 454 words WHEN IT
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COMES to screen drama, the French have long considered cinema and the film d’auteur to be the nobler
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art, one that helps define national identity. Television drama was traditionally treated as its poor cousin:
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unsophisticated, formulaic and risk-averse. Yet in recent years this hierarchy has been upended. France
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now offers plenty of compelling viewing on the small screen. A good place to start is “Dix Pour Cent” (“Call
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My Agent!”), which centres on a dysfunctional talent agency in Paris. The series follows half a dozen highly
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strung agents as they struggle to manage their roster of stars. The agents’ caprices and rivalries veer from
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the comic to the poignant, with occasional lapses into melodrama. All this is sustained by sharp dialogue,
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self-deprecating angst and warmth. In a twist, each episode also features a French film star—Isabelle
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Adjani, Juliette Binoche, Jean Dujardin—playing themselves. Produced for France 2, a public broadcaster,
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“Dix Pour Cent” attracted wider attention when Netflix bought the rights. A fourth and final season is
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currently in post-production in France. For a moodier pace, and the intrigue of contemporary espionage, it
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is well worth catching up with “Le Bureau des Légendes” (“The Bureau”, pictured), a cult hit from Canal+.
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Starring Mathieu Kassovitz as Guillaume Debailly, an espion progressively trapped by his own lies, the fifth
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season launched during lockdown. The bureau in question runs undercover agents for the French
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intelligence service. But this smart, unhurried Gallic take on a spy thriller features no special effects and
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few stunts. Rather it relies on psychological complexity, intricate geopolitics and a form of slow-burn
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realism said to have met with approval even among French intelligence officers. Equally unsentimental is
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“Baron Noir” (another Canal+ production), a political drama. Set in the gilded salons of the Elysée
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presidential palace, as well as the northern port of Dunkirk, it focuses on the compulsive and self-serving
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character of Philippe Rickwaert, superbly played by Kad Merad. A one-time Socialist mayor and member of
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parliament, he is out to play power politics at all costs, even to himself. What most of these series share,
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along with others such as “Engrenages” (“Spiral”) or “Les Revenants” (“The Returned”), is the adoption of
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an American-style TV-writing structure: a pool of writers, overseen by a showrunner who enjoys overall
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creative control. Not all French directors have taken well to being treated as hired hands. But series
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creators, such as Éric Rochant of “Le Bureau des Légendes”, also a director himself, have now earned power
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and prestige. The results speak for themselves. When she started out, Fanny Herrero, creator of “Dix Pour
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Cent”, analysed the best contemporary American television drama, realising that its French counterpart
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“had to modernise”. Now it has. Régalez-vous. ■

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE PANDEMIC

Seize the moment
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The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change—and creates a unique chance to
do so
1026 words FOLLOWING THE pandemic is like watching the climate crisis with your finger jammed on the
fast-forward button. Neither the virus nor greenhouse gases care much for borders, making both scourges
global. Both put the poor and vulnerable at greater risk than wealthy elites and demand government action
on a scale hardly ever seen in peacetime. And with China’s leadership focused only on its own advantage
and America’s as scornful of the World Health Organisation as it is of the Paris climate agreement, neither
calamity is getting the co-ordinated international response it deserves. The two crises do not just resemble
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each other. They interact. Shutting down swathes of the economy has led to huge cuts in greenhouse-gas
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emissions. In the first week of April, daily emissions worldwide were 17% below what they were last year.
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The International Energy Agency expects global industrial greenhouse-gas emissions to be about 8% lower
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in 2020 than they were in 2019, the largest annual drop since the second world war. That drop reveals a
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crucial truth about the climate crisis. It is much too large to be solved by the abandonment of planes, trains
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and automobiles. Even if people endure huge changes in how they lead their lives, this sad experiment has
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shown, the world would still have more than 90% of the necessary decarbonisation left to do to get on track
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for the Paris agreement’s most ambitious goal, of a climate only 1.5°C warmer than it was before the
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Industrial Revolution. But as we explain this week (see Briefing) the pandemic both reveals the size of the
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challenge ahead and also creates a unique chance to enact government policies that steer the economy
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away from carbon at a lower financial, social and political cost than might otherwise have been the case.
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Rock-bottom energy prices make it easier to cut subsidies for fossil fuels and to introduce a tax on carbon.
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The revenues from that tax over the next decade can help repair battered government finances. The
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businesses at the heart of the fossil-fuel economy—oil and gas firms, steel producers, carmakers—are
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already going through the agony of shrinking their long-term capacity and employment. Getting economies
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in medically induced comas back on their feet is a circumstance tailor-made for investment in climate-
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friendly infrastructure that boosts growth and creates new jobs. Low interest rates make the bill smaller
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than ever. Take carbon-pricing first. Long cherished by economists (and The Economist), such schemes use
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the power of the market to incentivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the
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shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible. The timing is particularly propitious because
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such prices have the most immediate effects when they tip the balance between two already available
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technologies. In the past it was possible to argue that, although prices might entrench an advantage for
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cleaner gas over dirtier coal, renewable technologies were too immature to benefit. But over the past
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decade the costs of wind and solar power have tumbled. A relatively small push from a carbon price could
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give renewables a decisive advantage—one which would become permanent as wider deployment made
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them cheaper still. There may never have been a time when carbon prices could achieve so much so quickly.
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Carbon prices are not as popular with politicians as they are with economists, which is why too few of them
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exist. But even before covid-19 there were hints their time was coming. Europe is planning an expansion of
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its carbon-pricing scheme, the largest in the world; China is instituting a brand new one. Joe Biden, who
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backed carbon prices when he was vice-president, will do so again in the coming election campaign—and
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at least some on the right will agree with that. The proceeds from a carbon tax could raise over 1% of GDP
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early on and would then taper away over several decades. This money could either be paid as a dividend
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to the public or, as is more likely now, help lower government debts, which are already forecast to reach
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an average of 122% of GDP in the rich world this year, and will rise further if green investments are debt-
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financed. Carbon pricing is only part of the big-bang response now possible. By itself, it is unlikely to create
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a network of electric-vehicle charging-points, more nuclear power plants to underpin the cheap but
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intermittent electricity supplied by renewables, programmes to retrofit inefficient buildings and to develop
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technologies aimed at reducing emissions that cannot simply be electrified away, such as those from large
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aircraft and some farms. In these areas subsidies and direct government investment are needed to ensure
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that tomorrow’s consumers and firms have the technologies which carbon prices will encourage. Some
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governments have put their efforts into greening their covid-19 bail-outs. Air France has been told either
to scrap domestic routes that compete with high-speed trains, powered by nuclear electricity, or to forfeit
taxpayer assistance. But dirigisme disguised as a helping hand could have dangerous consequences: better
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to focus on insisting that governments must not skew their bail-outs towards fossil fuels. In other countries
the risk is of climate-damaging policies. America has been relaxing its environmental rules further during
the pandemic. China—whose stimulus for heavy industry sent global emissions soaring after the global
financial crisis—continues to build new coal plants (see China section). Carpe covid The covid-19 pause is
not inherently climate-friendly. Countries must make it so. Their aim should be to show by 2021, when they
gather to take stock of progress made since the Paris agreement and commit themselves to raising their
game, that the pandemic has been a catalyst for a breakthrough on the environment. Covid-19 has
demonstrated that the foundations of prosperity are precarious. Disasters long talked about, and long
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ignored, can come upon you with no warning, turning life inside out and shaking all that seemed stable.
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The harm from climate change will be slower than the pandemic but more massive and longer-lasting. If
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there is a moment for leaders to show bravery in heading off that disaster, this is it. They will never have a
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more attentive audience. ■
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AFTER LOCKDOWNS The cure and the disease Lockdowns are blunt instruments that can cause immense
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harm. It is time to be more discriminating 1064 words SINCE CHINA locked down the city of Wuhan on
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January 23rd, over a third of the world’s population has at one time or another been shut away at home. It
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is hard to think of any policy ever having been imposed so widely with such little preparation or debate.
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But then closing down society was not a thought-out response, so much as a desperate measure for a
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desperate time. It has slowed the pandemic, but at a terrible price. As they seek to put lockdowns behind
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them, governments are not thinking hard enough about the costs and benefits of what comes next.
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Although social distancing may have to be sustained for months or years, lockdowns can only ever be
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temporary. That is because it is becoming clear how costly they are, especially in poor countries. Part of the
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price is economic. Goldman Sachs this week predicted that India’s GDP would fall in the second quarter at
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an annualised quarterly rate of 45%, and would rebound by 20% in the third quarter if lockdowns were
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lifted. Absa, a bank, reckons South Africa’s economy could shrink at an annualised rate of 23.5% in the
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second quarter. The poorest are hit very hard, because they have nothing to fall back on. In sub-Saharan
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Africa an individual in the lowest income quintile has only a 4% chance of receiving social assistance from
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the government in normal times. The combination of covid-19 and lockdowns could drive up to 420m
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people into absolute poverty—defined as having to live on less than $1.90 a day. That would increase the
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total by two-thirds and set back progress against penury by a decade (see International section). The
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consequences will be far-reaching. Hunger permanently stunts children. Lockdowns that block normal
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services cost lives. The World Health Organisation has warned that covid-19 threatens vaccination
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programmes. If they stop in Africa, 140 children could die for each covid death averted. A three-month
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lockdown, followed by a ten-month interruption of tuberculosis treatment, could cause 1.4m deaths in
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2020-25. It is the same for malaria and AIDS. The longer lockdowns continue, the likelier it is that they will
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cost more lives than they save. The picture in rich countries is less dramatic, but still worrying. America’s
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unemployment rate increased from 3.5% in February to 14.7% in April. In Britain a third of new graduates
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had a job offer withdrawn or delayed. Bond markets in America are signalling a wave of defaults, especially
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in hospitality, raw materials, carmaking and utilities. The scarring in the labour market could last for years.
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Rich-world services are vulnerable, too. One study concluded that delaying cancer consultations in England
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by six months would offset 40% of the life-years gained from treating an equivalent number of covid-19
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patients. Vaccination rates have fallen, risking outbreaks of diseases like measles. Lifting lockdowns risks a
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second wave. Iran reopened in April to save the economy, but last week designated the capital, Tehran,
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and eight provinces as “red zones”, because the virus is spreading there again. Some American states, such
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as Georgia, that never suppressed the initial outbreak will soon find whether they lifted lockdowns too
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hastily. Some African countries are going ahead even though their case loads are rising. To limit the risk
requires an epidemiological approach that focuses on the places and people most likely to spread the
disease. An example is care homes, which in Canada have seen 80% of all the country’s deaths even though
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they house only 1% of the population. In Sweden refugees turn out to be high-risk, perhaps because several
generations may be packed into a household. So are security guards, who are often elderly and are exposed
to many people in their work (see Science section). For this approach to succeed at scale, you need data
from tests to provide a fine-grained picture of how the disease spreads. Testing let Germany rapidly spot
that it had a problem in its slaughterhouses, where the virus persists longer than expected on cold surfaces.
Likewise, South Korea identified a super-spreader in Seoul’s gay bars. Without testing, a country is blind.
Armed with data, governments can continuously refine their policies. Some are universal. Masks were once
thought ineffective, but in fact help stop the spread of the disease. Like handwashing, they are cheap and
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do not impose hidden costs. However, closing schools harms children and stops parents from working. In
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contrast with flu, it turns out, the benefits to health are not especially great. Schools should reopen, under
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conditions that lower the risk to teachers and vulnerable pupils. As a rule, the balance of costs and benefits
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favours narrow local policies over blanket national ones. In Britain agency workers carry the virus between
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care homes: they should work at only one. Gibraltar has a Golden Hour, when open spaces are set aside for
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the over-70s to exercise while everyone else stays at home. Stockholm is moving vulnerable people into
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their own flats. Liberty University, run by Jerry Falwell, a supporter of President Donald Trump, was
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condemned for keeping its campus open. But thanks to social distancing, it has logged no cases of covid-
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19. Poor countries will not be able to afford all these approaches. However, Vietnam and the Indian state
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of Kerala have shown that good primary-health systems can devise and disseminate sensible adaptations.
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Poor countries have more experience of infectious diseases than rich ones. Epidemiologists talk of “smart
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containment” that all can practise. Rwanda has put foot-operated handwashing stations in busy places such
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as bus depots. Slums need clean water for handwashing and to cut queues. Local leaders can spread health
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messages and designate areas where suspected cases can be isolated. Markets must remain open, but limit
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social contact. If people can earn some money, millions who would otherwise go hungry could feed
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themselves. The emergency phase of the pandemic is drawing to a close. Too many governments failed to
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spot what was coming, but then did what they could. In the much longer second phase they will have no
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such excuse. They must identify groups at risk; devise and enact policies for them; explain these so that
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vulnerable people change their behaviour without becoming scapegoats; provide vital infrastructure; and
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be ready to adapt as new data come in. This will sort countries where the government works from those
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where it does not. The stakes could not be higher. ■

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The microchip is an American invention. But the chipmaking business has gone global. These days the dozen
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biggest semiconductor firms make only 27% of their sales in America. Just 20% of their plant is physically
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based there. Huawei evaded the worst effects of America’s original blacklist by switching suppliers and
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buying from non-American factories.

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It looks like big pharma’s moment to shine. However, the pandemic has also created new ethical and
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political dilemmas. Vaccine nationalism is spreading as governments panic that others may get their hands
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on crucial drugs first. France’s Sanofi has found itself embroiled in a transatlantic row over who will be first
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to get any covid-19 vaccine it develops. Paul Hudson, the firm’s boss, stated last week that because the
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American government invested in his firm’s risky scientific efforts, the United States would have early
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access. This led to a political explosion in France and a dressing-down from Emmanuel Macron, France’s
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president. And there is mounting pressure to suspend elements of the patent system. A gathering of the
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World Health Organisation this week passed a resolution urging drugs firms to pool patent rights. Several
dozen current and former world leaders released an open letter demanding that any successful covid-19
vaccine should be made available patent-free.
47
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First, a global agreement is needed to govern the manufacture and distribution of a potential vaccine. It
could take several years to vaccinate the world’s population; global co-operation will mean that the vaccine
is deployed first where it brings most benefit. Second, the patent system should be preserved because,
correctly designed, it incentivises investment in new treatments. The big drugs firms have already said they
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will make any vaccine available at cost-plus prices. Arrangements exist for tiered pricing of medicines and
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free vaccinations for diseases afflicting the world’s poor that should be extended to covid-19 treatments.
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If a smaller drugs firm tried to price-gouge, governments in the West and elsewhere have the powers to
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pass compulsory licensing orders in an emergency. When the pandemic passes, there must be no going
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back to the bad old days. Governments should seek to authorise new drug patents faster, as the best way
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to balance innovation and lower prices. And big pharma needs to keep investing. That will help shareholders
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and global public health, too.■
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Now oil’s future looks much more murky, depending as it does on a gallimaufry of newly questionable
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assumptions about commuting, airline routes, government intervention, capital spending and price
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recovery. In the future more people may work from home, and commuting accounts for about 8% of oil
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demand. But those who do commute may prefer to do so alone in their cars, offsetting some of those gains.
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Natural gas, the fossil fuel for which analysts have long predicted continued growth, has weathered the
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pandemic better than its two older siblings. But it, too, faces accelerating competition. One of gas’s niches
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is powering the “peaker” plants which provide quick influxes of energy when demand outstrips a grid’s
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supply. It looks increasingly possible for batteries to take a good chunk of that business. Those hoping for
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fossil fuels’ imminent demise should not be overconfident. As lockdowns around the world end, use of dirty
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fuels will tick back up, as they have in China. Energy emissions no longer rise in lockstep with economic
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growth, but demand for fossil fuels remains tied to it. Mr Currie of Goldman Sachs, for one, is wary of
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declaring a permanent decoupling: “I’m not willing to say there is a structural shift in oil demand to GDP.”
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Even so, a peak of fossil fuels in the 2020s looks less and less farfetched—depending on what governments
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do next in their struggle with the pandemic. Of all the uncertainties in energy markets, none currently looms
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larger than that. ■ NEVER

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Natural gas, the fossil fuel for which analysts have long predicted continued growth, has weathered the
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pandemic better than its two older siblings. But it, too, faces accelerating competition. One of gas’s niches
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is powering the “peaker” plants which provide quick influxes of energy when demand outstrips a grid’s
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supply. It looks increasingly possible for batteries to take a good chunk of that business. Those hoping for
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fossil fuels’ imminent demise should not be overconfident. As lockdowns around the world end, use of dirty
SO
fuels will tick back up, as they have in China. Energy emissions no longer rise in lockstep with economic
growth, but demand for fossil fuels remains tied to it. Mr Currie of Goldman Sachs, for one, is wary of
declaring a permanent decoupling: “I’m not willing to say there is a structural shift in oil demand to GDP.”
48
Even so, a peak of fossil fuels in the 2020s looks less and less farfetched—depending on what governments
do next in their struggle with the pandemic. Of all the uncertainties in energy markets, none currently looms
larger than that.
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TOURISM
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We aren’t off to sunny Spain
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Will the islands have a summer holiday season?
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515 words MADRID ON MAY 18TH for the first time in nine weeks the idyllic beaches of Formentera, the
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smallest of the Balearics, were open for bathing. The same went for three of the eight Canary Islands. The
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coronavirus lockdown means that all of Spain’s other beaches will remain closed for at least another week.
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But even when they open, how many holidaymakers will be able or willing to laze on them? For Spain much
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hangs on whether at least some of the summer season can be rescued from the virus. The tourist industry
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is 12% of the country’s economy and provides 13% of jobs. In the Balearics and the Canaries, the respective
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figures rise to over a third. And they are especially dependent on northern European sunseekers: between
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July and September 91% of tourists to the Balearics are foreigners, and to the Canaries the figure is 79%.
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Officials in both regions, which have seen low infection rates, are raring to open for business. The loss of
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the season would be “catastrophic”, says Francina Armengol, the regional president of the Balearics. She
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says she wants to open up flights for “pilot groups” of tourists through “safe corridors” from similarly virus-
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free European regions by the end of June. Such groups might include second-home owners. Those hopes
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were dashed when Spain’s government this month unexpectedly imposed a 14-day quarantine for arriving
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passengers. An official argued that it would be anomalous for Germans with holiday homes in the Balearics
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to travel there while many Spaniards cannot. Under Spain’s complex, four-stage and regionally varied
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deconfinement plan, domestic tourism will not start until July at the earliest. The quarantine “gave a very
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bad message”, says José Luis Zoreda of Exceltur, a tourism lobby, when rival destinations such as Portugal
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and Greece are sounding more welcoming. The minority coalition government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s
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prime minister, is under rising pressure to pay more heed to the shackled economy. With the conservative
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opposition now out to make life awkward for the government, only with difficulty this week did it scrape
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up enough parliamentary votes to prolong the state of emergency imposed in March for another two
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weeks. The government is coming round to allowing tourist flights to the islands from July, from places
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where the epidemic is under control. Whether that includes all or parts of Britain, usually the largest source
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of arrivals, will depend on the extent of the virus there and then. José Luis Ábalos, the transport minister,
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said he will not insist on empty seats on planes. The tourist industry is working on sanitary rules, to include
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safe distancing between towels on beaches and disinfecting hotel rooms. How many tourists might come?
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The Balearic administration reckons its islands may see 25% of the normal rate of arrivals in August, rising
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in September and October. Many northern Europeans may skip a foreign holiday this year, because of loss
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of income, to avoid risk, or because they like to plan ahead. For those who pluck up the courage, those
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Balearic beaches are likely to be pleasantly uncrowded and the locals unusually welcoming. ■
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PEAK LONDON
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The wheel turns

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For three decades, London was in the ascendant. Now it may have gone into a covid-accelerated decline
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1103 words BEFORE IT WAS blown off course by covid-19, Boris Johnson’s government had big plans to
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reshape the economic geography of Britain. Poor parts of the Midlands and north of England would get lots
of infrastructure investment, helping them to close the productivity gap with London. The country would
be “levelled up”. The idea always seemed a little far-fetched. British governments have been trying to boost
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productivity outside London for decades, with not much success. And it seems less and less likely that the
government will be able to focus on grand new designs as opposed to hasty repair jobs. But something else
might happen, to spare Mr Johnson’s blushes. Rather than levelling up, Britain could be about to level down,
as London sags. London was not always the great success it is now. After the second world war the
government, which had already pinched the capital with a thick Green Belt, deliberately pushed businesses
and citizens out to “new towns” in the Home Counties. Manufacturing declined, as did the docks that had
once provided jobs and prosperity. By the 1980s the city’s population had fallen by a quarter from the 8.6m
it had hit in 1939. London’s schools and services were famously awful. After the Big Bang deregulated
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financial services in 1986, the logic of agglomeration reasserted itself and London took off. The creative
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industries and, in recent years, a thriving tech centre have joined the staples of banking, asset management
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and business services. Schools, policing and transport have all been transformed. People have flooded in
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from all continents, making London the world’s most global city. Yet some warning signs have been visible
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for a while. Although London’s population has continued to grow, over the last decade that has been driven
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by international migration and the birth rate. Between 2008 and 2018, 550,000 more Britons left London
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than moved to it. People complain of high costs and anxiety. One league table in which London scores
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poorly is the Office for National Statistics’ rankings of well-being and life satisfaction. Since 2015 migration
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from the capital has helped reduce the differential between London’s house prices and those in the rest of
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the country (see chart). But London’s house prices remain double those elsewhere. After housing costs are
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accounted for Londoners are, on average, worse off than residents of the rest of southern England or
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Scotland. The chairman of PWC, a professional-services firm, has argued that graduates are turning their
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backs on London. Whereas 60% of graduates working for the big four accounting firms used to be based in
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the capital, in 2018 60% of new starters were outside. The London office-cost premium is even higher than
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the housing-cost one. Prime square footage in the capital costs three times as much as space in other
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southern cities and seven to nine times as much as elsewhere in Britain. According to a legal recruitment
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firm, a company can save about £20,000 ($24,500) a year by moving a lawyer out of central London, after
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office costs and salary are taken into account. “Northshoring”—usually referring, confusingly, to places such
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as Birmingham that are far from northerly—has become something of a buzzword in the industry. HSBC
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chose to move its British retail banking headquarters to Birmingham in 2017. Amazon, an internet retailer,
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picked Manchester for its major British corporate site in 2018. If the coronavirus crushes property values
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and office rents, London might become a little less offputting. Perhaps some graduates will be tempted
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back from Leeds or Manchester. But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat
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it pose a new and more profound danger to the capital, for they threaten two factors that have been central
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to its success: fun and foreigners. London’s triumph is at least partially based on it being a fun place to live.
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“People come here not only because you can get paid well but because you can have a good time,” says
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Douglas McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a consultancy. The bars and cafes
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of the East End have been an important driver of what Mr McWillams once dubbed the “flat white
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economy”, where people with interesting hair bounce ideas off each other while drinking trendy beverages.
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It is hard to have a flat white economy when you have to maintain two-metre distancing while queuing for
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your caffeine. Restaurateurs fear that being forced to operate at a lower capacity will drive many of them
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out of business. Theatres are facing disaster. As a hedge-fund manager puts it, “London without the culture
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and the restaurants is just a more expensive Frankfurt with more congestion.” Covid-19 might combine
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with Brexit to cut international migration. Although foreign candidates for London jobs will score better on
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Britain’s new points-based immigration system than those for jobs elsewhere in the country, because the
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jobs are better paid, the signal has been sent: Britain is not keen on mass immigration. Universities fear
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that foreign student numbers could fall by 20-50% in the year ahead. For London, with its more than
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100,000 foreign students, that is a problem. Like all great cities, London could also suffer from changing
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assumptions about work. Many firms now expect that some people will keep working from home even
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after the danger of coronavirus has receded—if not every day then several days a week. As firms learn to
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make do with smaller offices, workers might prize bigger homes outside London where they can have an
office. The trade-off between space and commuting time looks different if you only have to go in two or
three times a week. But if this happens, it will probably benefit commuter towns in the south-east rather
50
than the northern and Midlands towns that Mr Johnson wanted to help. Lisa Taylor of Coherent Cities, a
consultancy, remains optimistic. “The next two years are going to be very tough,” she argues.“But a
different city could emerge on the other side. One where land use has changed, where we have more co-
working and co-living spaces.” She reckons that a greener, less congested London could take its inspiration
from cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. But those are hardly world-beating metropolises. London is
unlikely to slip back into the dismal state it was in before the mid-1980s. It is likely to remain richer and
more productive than the rest of Britain. It will remain Europe’s most powerful magnet for talented
immigrants. Still, its pulling power is likely to wane. If that happens, Britain’s economy will probably suffer.
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But a less centralised country, in which opportunity was more evenly distributed, might be a better place
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in other ways.■
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TRANSPORT
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The great land grab
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Walkers and cyclists are annexing roads. They might not give them back
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632 words AFTER LONDON was destroyed by fire in 1666, several worthies drew up bold plans for a new
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city. The philosopher Robert Hooke, who lived and worked at Gresham College near Bishopsgate, envisaged
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a gridded city with small parks, rather like Barcelona. Others, including Sir Christopher Wren, an architect,
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and John Evelyn, a diarist, devised plans to improve the city. All were disappointed—the authorities moved
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too slowly, and London was rebuilt along its old medieval roads. But the streets around Hooke’s former
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home may be about to change. The Corporation of London, which runs the financial district, proposes to
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make the roads that once led to Gresham College one-way, and give space now occupied by cars to
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pedestrians and cyclists. Cars and buses will be barred altogether from other nearby streets between 7am
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and 7pm. Transport for London plans to sweep cars off London Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. These are bold
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schemes, affecting major roads that had been considered untouchable, says Giulio Ferrini of Sustrans, a
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cycling and walking charity. And central London is not the only place with plans. Camden High Street in
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north London is a mess of barriers and traffic cones, which take road space away from parked cars and give
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it to pedestrians. Bike lanes have popped up on thoroughfares like Park Lane and Euston Road.
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Birmingham’s city council plans to cut street parking and is considering carving bike lanes out of dual
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carriageway roads. Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester have similar plans. JSP, a company that
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makes barriers and traffic cones (including one called “dominator”) says that demand for its products has
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jumped. Will Norman, London’s walking and cycling commissioner, argues that the city has no choice but
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to repurpose roads for walking and cycling. In normal times Londoners rely on trains, buses and the Tube
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for more than two-fifths of their travel (see chart). Covid-19 has made them fearful of doing so: on the
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morning of May 18th London Underground carried 8% of the passengers that it did a year earlier. If lots of
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people transfer from public transport to cars, the streets will gum up and pollution will rise. The city must
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be quickly reconfigured to make that option seem less attractive, and cycling and walking more so. Yet the
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danger of gummed-up streets seems a long way off. London and other British cities are still deathly quiet.
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And if they do bounce back to life—which, if social distancing is a long-term reality, they may not—taking
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lanes away from cars might exacerbate congestion. Steve McNamara of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’
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Association reckons that covid-19 is merely an excuse to force through an anti-car strategy. “This is a land
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grab,” he says. It might be a worthy one nonetheless, if urbanites can be jolted out of their cars and onto
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pedals or pavements. The construction of a network of more-or-less safe bike routes is one reason that
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cycling has roughly doubled in London since 2000. But it is still a minority activity, accounting for less than
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3% of journeys. For all the cost and unpleasantness of driving in London, one in three trips is by car. Outside
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the capital, two-thirds are—a proportion that has barely changed in 15 years, according to the National
Travel Survey. The cycling and driving lobbies agree on one thing: although they are sometimes described
as temporary, many of the changes to roads will be permanent. People get used to new arrangements, and
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those who benefit do not want to give them up. “We’re not going to go back to the same situation,” says
Mr Norman. Cities have learned the lesson of London in the 17th century. You can change a city following
a crisis, but you have to move quickly, before things go back to normal. ■
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with graduates overseas. It is refreshingly drab,
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THE AFRICAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
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Lessons from Leonard
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A scholar wants to prepare African students for world-class doctoral programmes
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868 words ABOMEY-CALAVI AS LEONARD WANTCHEKON was having breakfast with his wife, Catherine
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Kossou, in 2007, she recalled how one friend could not trust anyone. Even as a child her friend would say:
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“That person is going to sell you,” or “He will make you disappear.” The words struck a chord with Mr
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Wantchekon. Now a professor at Princeton University, he was born in Zagnanado in central Benin. Some of
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the music he listened to in his youth—such as that of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou—had songs that
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warned against trusting those close to you. He wondered: “Does this have something to do with slavery?”
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Benin was a hub of the slave trade. More than 1m people were trafficked from the interior to the port of
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Ouidah, and then to America, Brazil or the Caribbean. Alongside Nathan Nunn of Harvard University, Mr
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Wantchekon looked for a relationship between the intensity of the slave trade and low levels of trust (and
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thus commerce). He found one. The resulting article is in the top 1% of most-cited economics papers. The
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story of the paper has broader relevance, explains Mr Wantchekon (pictured). It was his data-mining skills
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that helped him find the answer. But it was his Beninese background that raised the question. A professor
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with a purpose Mr Wantchekon is one of just a few African economists at elite Western universities. Most
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scholarship about Africa is done by academics who are neither African-born nor based in Africa. Influential
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development journals have few African scholars on their boards. Most major conferences about Africa do
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not take place there. The imbalance is partly a result of bias in overseas universities. But it is also because
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of conditions at African ones. Higher education is not a priority for politicians, who often send their children
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abroad, or donors, who prefer to fund schools. The result is underfunded and overcrowded universities
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that do not equip enough African graduates with the skills required to get into world-class doctoral
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programmes. The consequence is a profound loss, argues Mr Wantchekon. Countless young African
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intellectuals do not get a fair chance. The world gets a skewed picture of African countries because many
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of the best researchers come from elsewhere. That may be changing. In 2014 Mr Wantchekon founded the
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African School of Economics in Abomey-Calavi, Benin. Its aim is to offer African students the highest
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standards of mathematics and economics teaching, ensuring they can compete with graduates overseas. It
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is refreshingly drab, with no splurging on a flashy campus or needless technology. The 100 or so students
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pay $2,400 per year, about the same as at a public university. “This is not about doing something
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grandiose,” says Mr Wantchekon. It is a model that can be replicated. Another campus was opened this
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year in Ivory Coast. The school draws on several influences. The name nods to the London School of
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Economics. Princeton is one of more than a dozen “academic partners”. But another institution serves as
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an inspiration, too. Mr Wantchekon’s home town had one of the first schools set up by missionaries in
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Benin. Its presence changed the lives of many young people—and not just pupils. Studies by Mr
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Wantchekon and others have shown that the effects of missionary schools were felt broadly. Even children
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of villagers who did not go to the schools did better in life, a result of higher aspirations and a better-
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educated social network. Mr Wantchekon believes that his new school of economics can have widespread
knock-on effects as well. The journey of the son of two illiterate farmers from rural Benin to the Ivy League
is remarkable. But so is the detour. After enrolling at university Mr Wantchekon became an activist,
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campaigning against Mathieu Kérékou, a dictator who ruled for nearly 30 years. He lived on the run for five
years before being arrested in 1985. A year and a half later, after charming prison guards and exaggerating
his arthritis to get treatment outside the prison, Mr Wantchekon escaped. He crossed the border to Nigeria
and, after a brief spell in Ivory Coast, became a refugee in Canada. He returned to his studies, completing
a PhD at Northwestern University under the mentorship of Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate, who describes
him as “one of the best students I ever had”. Mr Wantchekon retains a fascination for African politics. He
has written about the conditions under which warlordism can turn into democracy. He has co-written
probably the only studies in which presidential candidates running in elections have subjected themselves
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to randomised controlled trials. These have found that, while promises of patronage are powerful in
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swaying voters, as cynics suggest, there are caveats. Women are less wooed by patronage, for example.
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And when candidates held town-hall meetings to discuss policy platforms, voters became more likely to
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vote on the basis of education and health rather than handouts. Another result of Mr Wantchekon’s
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political past is a preference for empiricism over ideology. A trip to Albania ended his blind affection for
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socialism. His school is not part of efforts to “decolonise” the African academy. Any student of politics must
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read Rousseau and Madison, he argues. The aim is to add to the sum of human knowledge, not subtract
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from it. “Be angry but also be thoughtful,” he says. ■
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EMERGING FROM two months under one of the world’s most stringent covid-19 lockdowns, India faces a
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double dilemma. The stay-at-home rules did indeed bend the virus’s growth curve. This means that, so far,
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fewer Indians are known to have died of the disease than Swedes, even though India has 134 times more
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people. Yet India’s lockdown failed to bend it far enough. “We put more effort into containing the people
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than containing the virus,” as one epidemiologist puts it. As a result, official covid-19 deaths have risen
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steadily to 150 a day and are still rising. The streets and workplaces that 1.3bn Indians are returning to will
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be more virus-infested than when the lockdown started.

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Already, however, India has paid a heavier economic price for the lockdown than have many countries
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initially hit harder by covid-19. In March alone no fewer than 140m workers are thought to have lost their
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jobs, catapulting the unemployment rate from 8% to an unprecedented 26% nationwide

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SINCE JAPAN recorded its first case of covid-19 on January 16th, 784 people have died across the country
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of 126m, fewer deaths than in one day in New York City during the peak of the outbreak there. On May
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14th the government lifted the state of emergency in 39 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, with more likely to be
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released this week. In terms of deaths relative to population, Japan ranks alongside South Korea, whose
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government has been widely praised for its management of the pandemic. Yet when it comes to public
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opinion, Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister, has been one of a small handful of world leaders to see his
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approval ratings drop, alongside covid-deniers like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Polls show that more than half of
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the Japanese public disapproves of the government’s handling of the virus. Limited testing, shortages of
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protective gear for medical workers, the botched handling of a super-spreading cruise ship and hesitation
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to impose a state of emergency have fuelled frustration and distrust. “Citizens and the private sector were
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far ahead of the government,” says Nakabayashi Mieko, a former opposition MP. On May 19th Japan’s
national broadcaster, NHK, found that more people disapproved than approved of Mr Abe’s government
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CHINA’S AMBASSADOR to Australia, Cheng Jingye, recently warned Australia it was treading a “dangerous”
path by pressing for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus (one that might reveal China
doing more to suppress information about early infections than to quash the outbreak itself). If relations
between the two countries soured, Mr Cheng threatened, Chinese tourists might have “second thoughts”
about holidaying Down Under. Families might wonder whether Australia really was the “best place to send
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their kids” to study. Ordinary Chinese might no longer want to “drink Australian wine, eat Australian beef”.
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In the event, China this week agreed to an inquiry, in the face of international pressure at the World Health
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Organisation’s annual assembly (held online). But it did so after slapping tariffs of over 80% on Australian
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barley on May 18th, having already banned beef from Australia’s four biggest abattoirs on May 12th. The
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abattoir ban blocks perhaps 35% of Australia’s exports of beef to China.
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Bloomberg, a news agency, reports that the Chinese government is considering submitting other choice
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Australian products, including seafood, dairy and wines, to new quality checks and anti-dumping reviews.
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Obscure changes to rules about iron ore are causing alarm. This highlights Australia’s conundrum: it has no
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consistent China policy. For years it has been happy to sell stuff into what Mr Jennings calls an “easy
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market”. But it also wants to continue to air ideological and geopolitical grievances.
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COVID-19 AND GLOBAL POVERTY

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The great reversal

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The number of poor people was steadily falling. Now it is rising fast
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2814 words DELHI, KAMPALA AND MEXICO CITY JANE KABAHUMA has been eating one meal a day since
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the end of March, when the lockdown began. She used to work in a hotel, but it had to close, along with
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most businesses in Uganda. She thinks “it will take time” before the work comes back. In five months she
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is expecting a baby; it may arrive before a job does. Her standard of living has plummeted. She used to pay
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to fill her jerrycans from a clean tap, but these days fetches water from a dirty well, because it is free. She
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gets by, more or less, with help from friends and family. But for how long? In normal times, people in poor
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countries have many ways to cope with shocks. If one member of a family falls sick, the others can work
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longer hours to make up for the lost income. Or they can ask cousins or neighbours for help. Or, if a whole
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village is impoverished by a bad harvest, they can ask a nephew working in a big city or a foreign country
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to send some extra cash. All these “coping mechanisms”, as development experts call them, depend on
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calamity not striking everywhere at once. Alas, covid-19 has done just that. In many places, workers cannot
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make up for lost income by working harder because demand for their labour has collapsed. Empty
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restaurants need no waiters; shuttered malls need no mopping; and few motorists are rolling down their
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windows to buy fruit from street hawkers. The newly impoverished cannot easily get help from friends or
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relatives because, no matter where in the world they are, they are all experiencing a simultaneous and
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massive economic shock. The World Bank predicts that remittances from migrant workers will drop by 20%
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this year. Male Nepali migrants who are still overseas are now sending back only a quarter of what they
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were in January. Many send back nothing at all, having returned home. Most countries in the developing
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world still require their citizens to stay at home, except to duck out for essentials. But few of the world’s
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poorest can work from home. And without work, many cannot eat. Thus, covid-19 imperils one of the
greatest achievements of recent decades—the stunning reduction in global poverty. From 1990 until last
year the number of extremely poor people—those who subsist on less than $1.90 per day—fell from 2bn,
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or 36% of the world’s population, to around 630m, or just 8%. Now, for the first time since 1998, that
number is rising—very fast. The big questions are: how many millions will slip back into penury? And will
they quickly escape again when the pandemic is past, or will its effects be long-lasting, or even permanent?
The answers to those questions are maddeningly hard to pin down. The World Bank estimates that national
lockdowns and the global economic collapse will push at least 49m people into extreme poverty,
eliminating nearly all the gains made since 2017. That seems implausibly rosy—the bank’s estimate was
based on data published in April. More recent numbers are far gloomier. For example, on May 17th
Goldman Sachs estimated that India’s economy is shrinking at an annualised rate of 45%. Andy Summer of
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King’s College London estimates that if global income per head falls by 20%,which it may for several months
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at least, the number of extremely poor people could increase by 420m—as much as the entire population
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of South America. That would wipe out a decade of gains in the fight against poverty. Many poor countries
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have copied the kind of lockdowns that have been imposed in rich countries. But the circumstances are
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utterly different. The well-off are much more likely to have jobs that can be done from home. And workers
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in rich countries who cannot do their jobs, such as hotel receptionists or waiters, are typically wellsupported
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by taxpayers. By contrast, when India imposed a strict and dramatic lockdown on March 24th, the 140m
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people who are estimated to have lost their jobs were suddenly in big trouble. Tens of millions of migrants
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who had moved from villages to cities suddenly had no income, no way to pay the rent and no trains to
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take them home, since those were also cancelled. Millions trudged hundreds of kilometres back to their
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home villages, where their families at least would take them in. The lockdown has been extended to May
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31st, with only small adjustments (see Asia section). Similar tales of woe are coming from other poor places.
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Over 80% of Kenyans and Senegalese reported a loss of income in early April. In a study for the University
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of Manchester, 60 Bangladeshi families have been writing “money diaries”. Before March, about $1,000 a
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month passed through each household (not all of it income). In April that fell to $300 or so. In middle-
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income countries, too, lockdowns have been excruciating. Colombia’s was so tough that it sparked protests
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in working-class barrios. In Altavista, a neighbourhood near San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, people
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have taken to hanging white flags from their windows to show that they have run out of food. “Almost
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overnight people go from having income to having no income,” says Carolina Sánchez-Páramo of the World
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Bank. Less income often means less food. The World Food Programme (WFP) predicts a doubling of acute
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hunger by the end of 2020. David Beasely, its boss, worries that the world could see “multiple famines of
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biblical proportions” within a few months. Health-care systems have been disrupted not only by the virus
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itself but also by lockdowns, which make it harder for people to seek treatment for other illnesses. A team
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at Johns Hopkins University calculates that across 118 poor and middle-income countries, disruption to
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health systems and hunger could kill 1.2m more children and 57,000 mothers over six months. The Stop TB
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Partnership, an international research group, reckons that in India alone interruptions of diagnosis and
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treatment from a three-month lockdown, followed by a 10-month recovery period, could cause 500,000
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excess deaths from tuberculosis. Some kinds of lockdown could cost more lives than they save. A report by
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the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimates that if restrictions prevent vaccinations, in
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Africa 140 will die for every covid-19 death prevented. Even moderate lockdowns can be harmful in very
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poor countries. The Malawian National Planning Commission and two think-tanks did a cost-benefit analysis
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of continuing Malawi’s restrictions, which include closing schools, curbing travel and stopping health
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outreach work. They estimated that the lockdown, if maintained for nine months, would avert 12,000
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deaths from covid-19. However, it would also cause more people to go hungry, making them vulnerable to
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TB and malaria, so the net number of deaths avoided would be roughly half that. And because the victims
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of coronavirus would be largely old people, whereas the victims of malaria would often be infants, the
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lockdown would actually cause a net loss of 26,000 years of life. The lockdown would also leave Malawi
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$12bn worse off, by stopping people from working and interrupting children’s education, thus dooming
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them to earn less in the future. That is equivalent to nearly two years’ GDP—an astounding sum. Overall,
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they estimated that the costs of the lockdown outweighed the benefits by 25 to 1. Such calculations are
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subject to a wide margin of error. Nonetheless, they explain why many experts think that rich-country style
lockdowns are unsustainable in many poor countries. No work, no pay, no food People who lack savings or
a functioning safety net cannot simply stop working. Yet millions are being forced to do so. Before the crisis
55
Jonathan Solmayor drove a tuk-tuk in Davao City in the Philippines. “I am feeding four mouths,” he says,
but “my only source of living was stopped.” In western Nepal men have seen the hours they can work for
wages fall by about 75%, according to the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale. In Uzbekistan
the number of households where at least one person works has dropped by over 40%. As the number of
breadwinners falls, the price of food is rising. In India the price of potatoes has jumped by over 15%. In
Uganda the prices of most key foods have gone up by over 15% since mid-March. The global food supply is
holding up, but local disruptions are severe. In the province of Quezon in the Philippines an “extreme”
quarantine has seen squash, beans, and watermelons wither in the fields. In India vegetables that were
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harvested have been left to rot as they cannot be transported to market. In East Africa covid-19 is not the
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only plague to strike this year: trillions of locusts are once again devouring crops. Some hope that the rural
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poor may escape the worst. The virus has taken longer to reach remote villages, where social distancing is
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easier than it is in slums. Subsistence farmers might be able to feed themselves. But even the poorest rural
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households in Africa buy almost half their food. Many would normally top up their income with paid work,
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but no longer can. Those who were already miserable have become more so. In Uganda the WFP has cut
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rations for refugees by 30%, and funding is drying up. In Bangladesh more than 70% of Rohingya refugees
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say they are now unable to buy food. The most concentrated suffering will be in big cities such as Kolkata
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and Kinshasa, says Ms Sánchez-Páramo. Even before the pandemic about 130m city-dwellers were
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extremely poor. Many kept their heads above the poverty line by pedalling rickshaws or hawking
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vegetables. Lockdowns have stopped that. In India 84% of poor urban self-employed have lost their work.
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Even where lockdowns are less strict, the urban poor are struggling. In Mexico City, where staying at home
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is more of a suggestion than a requirement, Romaldo San Juan Garcia normally spends his days polishing
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shoes. But these days the kind of people who can afford shoe-shines no longer wear leather shoes, since
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they are staying away from the office. In a long day on the street Mr Garcia polished only two pairs. Just to
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pay his monthly rent, he needs to shine about 100. In tough times his children would usually pick up extra
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shifts waiting tables. But because of the virus, the restaurants are shut. With so few other options, many
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of the newly destitute are doing things that will make it harder for them to escape poverty even if the
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economy recovers. They are eating less, selling productive assets and even pulling children out of school.
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“When I eat supper it means I will sacrifice lunch,” explains Nathan Tumuhimbise, a flower worker in
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Uganda who was sent home on unpaid leave. He has no idea whether he will be able to pay for his
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daughter’s next instalment of school fees. In desperation he has called his father in the village to sell some
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of the family goats. “I’m overwhelmed,” he says. Other workers he knows are even selling off their land.
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Why? “Survival, life and death,” he says. Assets such as land, livestock and motorbike taxis can be sold only
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once. When so many people try to sell them at the same time, prices collapse. And people who sell their
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productive assets today will have no source of income tomorrow. Cutting back on food is risky, too,
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especially for children. Malnutrition stops brains and bodies from growing properly. Stunting results in
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lower IQs, greater risk of chronic illness and lower lifetime earnings. In towns in Sierra Leone almost 60%
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of people said they had eaten fewer times than normal in the past week, according to the Yale Research
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Initiative. Fully 14% have gone a whole day without eating. Pulling kids out of school has awful long-term
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consequences. One World Bank paper found that if schools remain closed for just four months, the
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reduction in their lifetime earnings will be equivalent to 15% of a year’s global GDP. We’re here to help
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Governments can help. Fully 181 countries have announced extra efforts to protect the poor, about 60% of
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which involve cash or food aid. For millions, these have proven a lifeline. Ganesh, an auto-rickshaw driver
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in Delhi, says he was lucky to spot an advert about a state government scheme to pay idle auto drivers a
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one-off 5,000 rupees (about $70). He texted in his ID and soon got the money. However, the vast majority
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of the cash in all these new welfare schemes is in rich countries. In the poorest ones, extra social spending
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announced so far amounts to just $1 per head—in total, not per day. Other drivers applied for help too,
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says Ganesh, but they have not received anything. Existing safety nets have long focused on rural folk,
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which used to make sense because they were the poorest. However, many of the newly poor are in cities.
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Systems need to adapt, but many are badly managed. India’s federal programme of cash and food handouts
is scattershot and misses many of the neediest. In Uganda the government’s own spokesperson described
its efforts to get aid to the right people as “inadequate, incompetent, disorganised.” Egypt has managed to
56
get payments only to 2m of its 100m people. In countries such as Kenya and Bangladesh mobile money is
being used to distribute aid more quickly. But the poorest are often hard to reach. Governments often do
not know who they are. And welfare systems were not designed with pandemics in mind. In South Africa
delays have led people to form queues (not always socially distanced ones) outside post offices to sign up
for benefits. In many countries corruption limits the effectiveness of welfare. In Zimbabwe aid has been
steered to supporters of the ruling party. In Uganda MPs initially put themselves in charge of distributing
$2.6m of relief cash in their constituencies (a court ruled they should pay it back). The biggest problem,
though, is simply that governments in the poorest countries do not have much money. And they are getting
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poorer. The World Bank says that African government revenues will drop between 12% and 16% this year.
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In Nigeria, home to more extremely poor people than any other country, the collapse of the oil price has
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shredded government spending plans. During the global financial crisis many poor countries slashed
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spending on education; they may do so again. All this has prompted calls to ease lockdowns. That will not
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save poor countries from being battered by the global economic crisis. Nor will all businesses reopen if
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people are still scared of being infected. But at least the poor would be able to try to work and children
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would be able to get vaccinations. Nigeria has already loosened lockdowns in some big cities, even as cases
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rise. Bangladesh and Pakistan have eased up, too. India will open up somewhat next month. This is not
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always popular—after two weeks shut in, 82% of Indians supported the first extension there. Ghana, one
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of the first in Africa to remove some restrictions, shows the risks. In one fish factory, 533 workers were
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recently infected. Lock down smarter However, the choice is not binary: total lockdown or no precautions
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at all. Governments and citizens can do a lot to prevent infections without freezing the whole economy.
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They can protect the elderly while letting most adults go to work and children go to school. They can keep
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nightclubs closed but allow markets, bus stations and factories to open—with compulsory masks, hand-
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washing and social distancing. They can do a better job of spotting outbreaks and quarantining the infected.
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They can teach people the facts about the disease, so they can protect themselves. Community health
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workers did this well during the Ebola crisis. Whatever the approach, poor countries will need help from
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developed ones. Rich countries have spent a stunning $8trn on supporting their own citizens during the
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pandemic, notes Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. It is in their interest to help poor
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countries grapple with the disease—otherwise they will become a coronavirus reservoir that can reinfect
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the rich. Yet the international response has been “very go slow”, says Matthew Spencer of Oxfam, an NGO.
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So far the IMF and World Bank have lent about $20bn and $6bn respectively. Talks about debt relief are
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moving lethargically. In the past, crises have sometimes fostered solidarity with the poor, notes Amartya
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Sen of Harvard University. In Britain during the 1940s life expectancy shot up by seven years, thanks to a
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wartime rationing system that ensured everyone had nourishing (if dull) food. According to a forthcoming
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UN Development Programme study between 2013 and 2016, despite an Ebola epidemic, living standards
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in Sierra Leone improved faster than in any of 70 poor countries. The huge effort to fight Ebola had spillover
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effects, as aid-workers and public servants also helped improve nutrition and child mortality. It would be
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wonderful if covid-19 could inspire similar efforts. But for now, the rich world is too distracted by its own
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problems to pay much heed to the poor.■

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ONCE MORE, WITH RENEWABLES

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Not-so-slow burn
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The world’s energy system has been transformed before—but never as quickly or completely as must
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happen now
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1605 words
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FOR MORE than 100,000 years humans derived all their energy from what they hunted, gathered and
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grazed on or grew for themselves. Their own energy for moving things came from what they ate. Energy
for light and heat came from burning the rest. In recent millennia they added energy from the flow of water
and, later, air to the repertoire. But, important as water- and windmills were, they did little to change the
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overall energy picture. Global energy use broadly tracked the size of a population fed by farms and warmed
by wood. The combination of fossil fuels and machinery changed everything. According to calculations by
Vaclav Smil, a scholar of energy systems at the University of Manitoba, between 1850 and 2000 the human
world’s energy use increased by a factor of 15 or so. The expansion was not homogeneous; over its course
the mixture of fossil fuels used changed quite dramatically. These are the monumental shifts historians call
“energy transitions”. They require huge amounts of infrastructure; they change the way the economy
works; and they take place quite slowly. James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769; coal did not exceed
the share of total energy provided by “traditional biomass”—wood, peat, dung and the like—until the 1900s
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(see chart). It was not until the 1950s, a century after the first commercial oil well was drilled in Titusville,
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Pennsylvania, that crude oil came to represent 25% of humankind’s total primary energy. Energy transitions
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were slow largely because the growth in total energy use was fast. In the century it took oil to capture a
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quarter of the total, that total increased. They are also always incomplete. New fuels may reduce the share
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of the pie that old fuels control, but they rarely reduce the total energy those fuels supply. Much more
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“traditional biomass” is burned by the world’s poor today than was burned by the whole world in 1900. To
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give the world a good chance of keeping global warming, measured against the temperature pre-coal, well
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below 2°C (3.6°F) will require an energy transition far larger and quicker than any before it. In the next 30-
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50 years 90% or more of the share of the world’s energy now being produced from fossil fuels will need to
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be provided by renewable-energy sources, nuclear power or fossil-fuel plants that bury their waste rather
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than exhaling it. During this time, the pie will keep growing—but not necessarily as fast as it used to. The
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direct relationship between GDP and energy use, which held tight until the 1970s, has weakened over the
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past half century. It is possible for growth per person to continue without energy use per person increasing.
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Though the population is no longer growing as fast as it did at the 20th-century peak of its increase, it will
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still be the best part of 2bn higher by mid-century. And all those people should be able to aspire to modern
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energy services. Today more than 800m people still lack electricity—hence all that burning of traditional
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biomass. The good news, however, is that governments say they are willing to push through the change.
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Previous transitions, though shaped by government policy at national levels, were mostly caused by the
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demand for new services that only a specific fuel could provide, such as petrol for engines. The growth in
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renewable-generation capacity is the exception. It has not been driven by the fact that renewable electrons
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allow you to do things of which those from coal are not capable. It has largely been driven by government
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policy. This has not always had the near-term effects for which such policy should aim. Germany’s roll-out
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of renewables has been offset by its retreat from nuclear, and its emissions have risen. But subsidies there
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and elsewhere have boosted supply chains and lowered the cost of renewable technologies. During the
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2010s the levelised cost (that is the average lifetime cost of equipment, per megawatt hour of electricity
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generated) of solar, offshore wind and onshore wind fell by 87%, 62% and 56%, respectively, according to
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BloombergNEF, an energy-data outfit (see chart). This has allowed deployments that were unthinkable in
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the 2000s. Britain now has 10,000 offshore wind turbines. They are built by developers chosen based on
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how low a price they are willing to take for their electricity (the government pledges to make the cost up if
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the market price falls below it). In 2015 winning bids were well over £100 ($123) per MWh, far higher than
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the cost of fossil-fuel electricity. Thanks to predictable policy, fierce competition and technical progress, a
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recent auction brought a bid as low as £39.65 per MWh, roughly the level of average wholesale power
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prices. Solar and onshore wind are even less expensive. About two-thirds of the world’s population live in
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countries where renewables represent the cheapest source of new power generation, says BloombergNEF.
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Solar power is the really spectacular achiever, outstripping the expectations of its most fervent boosters.
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Ramez Naam, a bullish solar investor, recently recalibrated his expectations to foresee a future of “insanely
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cheap” solar power. By 2030, he reckons, in sunny parts of the world, building large new solar installations
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from scratch will be a cheaper way of getting electricity than operating fully depreciated fossil-fuel plants,
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let alone building new ones. Michael Liebreich, a consultant on renewable energies, speculates about a
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“renewable singularity” in which cheap renewable electricity opens up new markets that demand new
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capacity which makes electricity cheaper still. Even without such speculative wonders, the effect of
renewables is appreciable. Together with natural gas, which America’s fracking revolution has made
cheaper, solar and wind are already squeezing coal, the energy sector’s biggest emitter (a megawatt of coal
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produces a stream of emissions twice the size of that given off by a megawatt of gas). In 2018 coal’s share
of global energy supply fell to 27%, the lowest in 15 years. The pressure that they can apply to oil is not yet
as great, because oil mostly drives cars, and electric cars are still rare. But as that changes, renewables will
come for oil, as they are already coming for gas. There are stumbling blocks. Neither the sun nor the wind
produces energy consistently. Germany’s solar-power installations produce five times more electricity in
the summer than they do in the winter, when demand for electricity is at its peak. Wind strengths vary not
just from day to day but from season to season and, to some extent, year to year. This amounts to a speed
bump for renewables, not a blockade. Long transmission lines that keep losses low by working at very high
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voltages can move electricity from oversupplied areas to those where demand is surging. Lithium-ion
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batteries can store extra energy and release it as needed. The economic stimulus China announced in March
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includes both ultra-high-voltage grids and electric-vehicle-charging infrastructure. Thou orb aloft,
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somewhat dazzling As the sun and wind account for a larger share of power, renewables might store power
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by splitting water to create hydrogen to be burned later. More ambitiously, if technologies for pulling
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carbon dioxide back out of the air improve, such hydrogen could be combined with that scavenged carbon
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to make fossil-free fuels. In doing so, they might help remedy the other problem with renewables. There
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are some emissions which even very cheap electricity cannot replace. Lithium-ion batteries are too bulky
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to power big planes on long flights, which is where artificial fuels might come in. Some industrial processes,
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such as cement-making, give out carbon dioxide by their very nature. They may require technology that
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intercepts the carbon dioxide before it gets into the atmosphere and squirrels it away underground. When
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emissions cannot be avoided—as may be the case with some of those from farmland—they will need to be
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offset by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere either with trees or technology. None of this
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happens, though, without investment. The International Renewable Energy Agency, an advisory group,
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estimates that $800bn of investment in renewables is needed each year until 2050 for the world to be on
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course for less than 2°C of warming, with more than twice that needed for electric infrastructure and
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efficiency. In 2019 investment in renewables was $250bn. The big oil and gas firms invested twice as much
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in fossil-fuel extraction. If governments want to limit climate change, therefore, they must do more. They
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do not have to do everything. If policy choices show that the road away from fossil fuels is right, private
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capital will follow. Investors are already wary of fossil-fuel companies, eyeing meagre returns and the
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possibility that action on climate change will leave firms with depreciating assets. But governments need
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to make the signals clear. Around the world, they currently provide more than $400bn a year in direct
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support for fossil-fuel consumption, more than twice what they spend subsidising renewable production.
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A price on carbon, which hastens the day when new renewables are cheaper than old fossil-fuel plants, is
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another crucial step. So is research spending aimed at those emissions which are hard to electrify away.
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Governments have played a large role in the development of solar panels, wind turbines and fracking. There
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is a lot more to do. However much they do, though, and however well they do it, they will not stop the
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climate change at today’s temperature of 1°C above the pre-industrial. Indeed, they will need to expand
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their efforts greatly to meet the 2°C target; on today’s policies, the rise by the end of the century looks
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closer to 3°C. This means that as well as trying to limit climate change, the world also needs to learn how
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to adapt to it. ■
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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 1841-1846 | Ajouté le lundi 25 mai 2020 08:36:52

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AROUND THE world industries have grown more concentrated over the past few decades. In America 20
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companies capture roughly a quarter of all corporate profits. If you thought that was sobering news for
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budding American capitalists, spare a thought for their Indian counterparts. According to a study by
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Marcellus Investment Managers, a Mumbai-based firm, last year a score of companies accounted for nearly
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70% of India Inc’s total earnings, up from 14% three decades ago (see chart). In a growing number of
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product categories—from paint and adhesives to biscuits and baby formula—monopolies or duopolies skim
off 80% of profits.
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BARTLEBY
Zoomers, zeros and Gen Z
The pandemic has widened divides in the labour market
738 words
COUNTRIES ARE beginning to emerge from economic lockdown. As they do, the statistics show how
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different segments of the population have been affected by the pandemic. And the evidence is clear that
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the virus has widened existing divides between professionals, low-paid workers and the young. Start with
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the most fortunate. Many professionals can easily work at home, replacing one-to-one meetings with
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phone calls and group meetings with Zoom gatherings or Google hangouts. These “Zoomers” are mostly
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working on full pay and are currently being spared the daily commute. For them, the lockdown may be an
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inconvenience (particularly if they have children) but it is not a threat to their standards of living. For many
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others, however, the pandemic is a serious threat. Some are key workers, who have to attend their jobs
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and are at more risk from the virus. Others cannot work from home and have either lost their jobs or seen
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their incomes cut (despite help from government schemes). Many in this group were already in a weaker
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position than the Zoomers, because they were in jobs with lower wages or less security. Some people in
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this less fortunate group can be dubbed the “zeros”. In Britain, almost three-quarters of those on zero-
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hours contracts are key workers or work in shut-down sectors, says the Resolution Foundation, a think-
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tank. A further clue to the toll on the low-paid came from the latest American non-farm payroll figures.
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Average hourly earnings rose by 4.7% in April, the biggest monthly gain on record. That sounds like good
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news but isn’t. It is the result of low-wage workers losing jobs in sectors like hospitality. The same trend
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can be seen in Britain, where the average wage of those in shut-down sectors is less than half of those
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working at home, according to the Resolution Foundation. The mortality rates make even grimmer news.
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The low-paid (and ethnic minorities) have suffered most. Figures from Britain’s Office for National Statistics
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showed that death rates of security guards, care workers and bus drivers were much higher than average,
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while those in “professional occupations” had death rates well below the mean. Another great divide is
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between those already established in the workforce and Generation Z—those born in the late 1990s and
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early 2000s who are now coming of age. They are entering a job market extremely hostile to their prospects.
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Around 30% of British employees aged under 25 worked in one of the shut-down sectors, according to the
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Institute for Fiscal Studies, another think-tank, compared with 13% of those aged over 25. Those in
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university education are also badly affected. For a start, it is harder to get work experience. In America 22%
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of employers have cancelled internship offers, according to the National Association of Colleges and
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Employers. In the first week of May just under 2,500 internships were posted on Monster.com, a
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recruitment website, compared with over 18,000 in the same week last year. Many of the remaining
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internships were in roles which could be done remotely. In Britain firms have cut entry-level jobs by 23%,
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says the Institute of Student Employers, a recruiters’ association. The short-term shock of the pandemic
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will leave long-term scars. The Resolution Foundation estimates that the pandemic means those emerging
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from education this year will be less likely to have jobs in three years’ time. The likelihood of being in
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employment would fall by 13% for graduates and 37% for those with the fewest qualifications. The effect
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could last into the 2030s. A study of the effect of recessions on younger workers by Bart Cockx of Ghent
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University in Belgium found that it takes about ten years for cohorts that enter the labour market during a
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downturn to catch up with cohorts that did not. At least young people are far less likely to suffer severe
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symptoms from the virus than older generations. But the economic hit comes at a time when many already
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worry about the burden of student debt and the lack of well-paying jobs: a survey last year by Deloitte, a
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consultancy, found that a third of Gen Z-ers who planned to move jobs felt there were not enough
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opportunities to advance in their careers. That the low-paid and the young are the hardest hit economically
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by the pandemic is a dark echo of the King James Bible: “But whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken
away even that he hath.” The social and political consequences may be huge.
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CONTROLLING COVID-19 To each according to his need The risk of severe coronavirus infections is not
uniform. That calls for a fine-tuning of measures to stop the illness spreading 1393 words NABBING A
DISEASE hotspot is to epidemic control what locking up a serial perpetrator is to crime investigation. Success
hinges on similar skills, as John Snow, an Englishman who drew up the principles of modern epidemiology,
demonstrated in 1854. That year a cholera outbreak in central London killed more than 500 people in just
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two weeks. Snow investigated around 60 of those deaths and found a common factor: a contaminated
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water pump. Removing its handle ended the outbreak. The lockdowns to stop covid-19 have been a radical
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departure from the tenets of epidemiology. They are the equivalent, in cholera terms, of taking the handles
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from all of London’s water pumps. But emerging patterns in the outbreaks and deaths from the infection
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suggest that the post-lockdown phase will involve a return to classic epidemiology. It will, in other words,
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be calibrated to the places and people involved. What might work in densely packed, multicultural New
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York City will be different from what is suitable in homogeneous, rural Wisconsin. The ultimate goal is
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unchanged, however: to shield those most likely to develop severe symptoms from exposure to SARS-CoV-
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2, the virus that causes the disease. Homes and castles Who these high-risk individuals are is now becoming
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clearer, as research from around the world piles up. Some of the strongest evidence is from a study
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published on May 7th by Ben Goldacre of Oxford University and his colleagues. This looked at the medical
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records of more than 17m people in Britain, about 6,000 of whom had died from the new illness. The
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Goldacre study confirmed previous suspicions that mortality risks are particularly high (after accounting for
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old age, smoking and poverty—which other investigations have not had the data to do) for people who are
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obese, who have diabetes, who have cancer or who have received a transplanted organ. Being a man is
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also risky. The biggest risk factor of all, nevertheless, is being old. People in their 60s are twice as likely to
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die of covid-19 than are those in their 50s. Mortality from the disease shoots up still more rapidly from the
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age of 70, so that even healthy elderly people are at significant risk. Data for nine rich countries gathered
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from various sources by The Economist show that care homes for the elderly and infirm have accounted
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for 40-80% of covid-19 deaths (see chart 1). That is a dreadful fact. But it also offers an opportunity.
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Focusing efforts on care homes would cut the death toll considerably. This means implementing infection-
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prevention routines similar to those in hospitals, such as protective masks and gowns for staff, as well as
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testing both staff and residents frequently for active SARS-CoV-2 infection. Testing regular visitors may be
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prudent too—or finding other ways to stop them bringing in the virus. Some Dutch care homes, for
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example, have installed glass partitions in the rooms where residents and visitors meet. Generalising this
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approach may offer lessons for dealing with the disease in the wider world. One strategy, put forward by
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academics from Edinburgh University, is to divide the population into three segments: those most
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vulnerable; their close regular contacts (which the researchers call “shielders”); and everyone else.
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Shielders include those who live with the vulnerable, relatives who visit them and social workers who care
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for them. In this analysis, the vulnerable themselves need to take the strictest precautions to avoid infection
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and shielders need to take greater precautions than everyone else. Ideas about how to make this happen
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are already popping up. Gibraltar and Bulgaria, for example, have designated a Golden Hour each day, when
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parks and public spaces are reserved for the elderly, with others asked to stay home. Contact-tracing apps,
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which alert those who have been close to an infected individual, would be particularly valuable for
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shielders—along with stricter hand-hygiene measures, face masks and social distancing. Shielders could
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also be given priority for testing. How many would be in each of these segments depends on the criteria
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for vulnerability. England’s National Health Service has identified 1.5m people at high risk because of a pre-
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existing medical condition. That is 2.7% of the population. If the definition were expanded to include people
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over 70 and those under that age who are in care homes, thereby accounting for roughly 80% of those who
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seem to suffer severe covid-19 infections, it would include 20% of the population. The Edinburgh team
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estimates that, on average, there is one shielder for each person in this expanded group. That would let
60% of the population go about their daily lives with only moderate levels of social distancing. Who’s who?
Identifying who is vulnerable is, though, itself fraught with difficulties. Besides the elderly and those with
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particular medical conditions, a third set of people confirmed to be at risk by Dr Goldacre’s study were
members of certain ethnic minorities. Even after accounting for differences in other illnesses and poverty,
black people and those whose ancestors came from South Asia were 60-70% more likely to die from covid-
19 than white Britons. In Sweden the share of immigrants from Iraq, Syria and Somalia among those in
hospital with severe covid-19 has been substantially bigger than their share of the Swedish population. In
Norway, where 15% of residents are foreign-born, they constituted 25% of those who had tested positive
for SARS-CoV-2 by April 19th. In America minorities are suffering too. Covid-19 deaths have been
disproportionately concentrated among blacks and Hispanics. These sorts of data can help disease-control
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authorities identify the mix of measures that can best cut SARS-CoV-2 deaths in specific subgroups. One
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revelation from the statistics so far is that living arrangements such as multigenerational households, which
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are common among some minorities for cultural and economic reasons, make it harder for them to prevent
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infection of vulnerable household members. In America 26% of blacks and 27% of Hispanics live either in
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households which include at least two adult generations, or in so-called grandfamilies of grandparents and
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grandchildren under 25, but without the intermediate children. That compares with 16% of white
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Americans in similar circumstances. Overcrowding is also a problem. In Britain about a third of Bangladeshi
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households and 15% of black-African households are classified as overcrowded by the Office for National
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Statistics, compared with 2% of white British households. To resolve these matters some places have set
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up quarantine facilities for those who cannot isolate themselves at home. Sweden is particularly generous
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in this regard. Stockholm is offering separate flats to people in big immigrant households who are at high
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risk of severe covid-19. Communication is also important. Translating information on SARS-CoV-2
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prevention into the languages spoken by immigrant groups was an early omission in many sets of control
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measures. So was the dissemination of relevant information through the channels used to learn about such
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things, such as local community leaders and radio stations in people’s first languages. Measures of this sort
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are not a novelty in public health. They were deployed, for example, in recent outbreaks of measles in
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Britain, many of which started among immigrants from eastern Europe. Certain jobs, too, carry a particular
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risk of infection. Some of the biggest outbreaks in America, Germany and Denmark have been in
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slaughterhouses, where crowded working conditions, and also possibly the cold (for there is evidence that
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SARS-CoV-2 survives better at low temperatures), make the spread of the virus particularly easy. Nor does
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it help that workers in these places are often migrants who live in crowded housing. Some other jobs, too—
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especially in the service sector of the economy—have a similar double-whammy: a greater risk for SARS-
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CoV-2 infection and a high share of older workers (see chart 2). In Britain jobs that fall into this category
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include security guards, plumbers and bricklayers. Employers need to follow stricter measures to shield
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such workers from infection. These could include reassigning the vulnerable to less risky tasks, stricter
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hygiene, rules that ensure physical distancing in the workplace and routine checks for symptoms. All of
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these fine-grained prevention strategies would depend on the continued collection of data about the
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prevalence of infection in various groups. Increased testing capacity and better tests for current and past
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infection are making that easier. If these can be rolled out quickly and reliably, the next waves of covid-19
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cases should be smaller and less damaging to social life and national economies. ■
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LITTLE RICHARD Gonna have some fun tonight Richard Wayne Penniman, aka Little Richard, king of rock &
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roll, died on May 9th, aged 87 1112 words WHAT WAS it, that thing he had? What was it that propelled him
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in 1955 from washing pots at the Greyhound bus station in Macon, Georgia, to being such a star that girls
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fainted to see him and he was paid $10,000 an hour? And from a cat that everyone laughed at, never good
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for anything but scrubbing dishes, into the inventor of the sound that formed a whole generation of music-
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makers, from the Beatles to James Brown to Elton John to the Rolling Stones? Because almost everybody
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agreed: he was the one. It was partly the look that got him noticed, the pancake make-up and mascara
round those wildly staring eyes, the pencil moustache, the pompadour rearing up on his head. He’d
borrowed all that from doing drag acts in local vaudeville shows, together with his ever-growing dazzle of
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sequins, glass beads and neon-bright colours to catch whatever spotlight there was. Then came the crazy
antics: jumping around, sticking one leg up on the piano as he played, pretending to shove his lead
saxophonist off the stage, until by the end of the show he’d be a pool of water, dabbing his face with a
hanky and asking, “Am I still pretty?” (His band, the Upsetters, also in make-up, would be fairly sweating,
too.) But all that came second to the electrifying rhythm of his pounding hands, the right hand especially,
the piano roaring and reverberating like a train, and the voice that roared with it, throat-scraping hoarse,
rising time after time to a yelp like a whistle: “Lu-cille-uh! Please come back where you belong!” The words
often made no sense, but that didn’t matter. Rhythm ripped it all up, so fast and wild that you just had to
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dance. As he whooped in “Tutti Frutti”, the record that made his name, Whop bop b-luma b-lop bam bom!
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That was his thing, right there: mix boogie-woogie with rhythm & blues and a shot of gospel, add those yips
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and shouts (it was tricky at first to sing so hard, but he got used to it), crank the volume, speed it way up.
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Other singers had done pieces of this. He took his woo-ooh-ooh from Marion Williams, his yelps from Ruth
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Brown, general inspiration from Mahalia Jackson, but it was he who combined them to produce, between
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1955 and 1958, a slew of hits—“Good Golly Miss Molly”, “Long Tall Sally”, “Lucille”, “The Girl Can’t Help
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It”—that defined a new sound for a new age, rock & roll. Once turned on he never turned off, plugged into
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that energy 24/7. Inevitably it shook society up, and not just musically. His sexuality did that, too. He
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swerved around on whether he was gay or not, picking “omnisexual” as what came nearest, but he was
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proud to say that he had worn purple, and eyelashes, when no men were wearing that. He was the bronze
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Liberace, the Magnificent One; didn’t care two cents what people thought. The make-up, though, had been
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partly to show he was no threat to white women, and his stardom challenged views on race even more.
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When he began, no Top 40 radio station would play black artists; his songs wouldn’t feature there unless
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they were covered by white singers like Pat Boone who didn’t have the rhythm or the speed, couldn’t get
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their mouths together. But white audiences accepted his music from the start, and he was the first to get
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played. At his shows in the South, still segregated, the white kids were so keen to get close to him that they
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would jump down from their balcony seats to dance with the blacks below. The seeds of this liberating
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music had been in him a long time. “Tutti Frutti” had jumped around in his head since his boyhood in the
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slums of Macon, together with the songs of the washboard man (“Bam-a-lam-bam/You shall be free) and
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the high cries of the travelling grocer (“Blackeyed peas and a barrel of beans”). His songs were his
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experiences: “Good Golly Miss Molly” was something his old toothless Aunt Lulu said, when they put
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marijuana in her tobacco pipe. Rhythm & blues, “devil music”, was not allowed at home, but whatever
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music he seized on, he liked loud. At church he was barred once for hollering, and he liked to try out zippy
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interjections when he led the hymns. Crazy-noise-making, and his love of flouncing in curtains, led his father
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to kick him out of the house when he was 16 or so. He hadn’t yet dared try his music on the public, but he
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was already sure he had that little thing, his own thing, which he wanted the world to hear. It would get
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him the Cadillac he yearned for, at least. He did better than that; at 19 he had a record contract, and at 23
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national fame. In the event the stardom road zigged and zagged all over the place. The Spirit of the Lord
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kept butting in, sending dreams in which he was saved from crashing aeroplanes or warned of coming
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damnation. In 1957, while everyone was fawning over him, he suddenly threw it all up and went off to
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Alabama to become a minister. Four years later he was enticed back to showbiz and feted all over again,
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mobbed by 40,000 fans when he flew to Europe, and on later visits offering slots in his triumphant tours to
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both the fledgling Beatles and the fledgling Rolling Stones. (When he read the Bible backstage, the
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irreverent Beatles would sit reverently round just to enjoy the sound of the master’s voice.) By 1975,
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though, when he was spending $10,000 a month on cocaine, eating it, snorting it, freezing it, he returned
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to sobriety and travelled round preaching. Between the two pillars of his life, God and the half-dozen huge
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hits of his early career—which audiences never tired of—he bounced like a ball on a string. But why, he
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thought more and more, should these be separate? God brought joy to the human race, but so did rock &
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roll. His music was a healer; it could make the blind see and the lame walk. When he put on vests of mirrors
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and billowing shirts, as he went on doing into the next century, he was winged like an angel, a beautiful
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Living Flame. He hardly needed an electric suit, though he had one. He could light the world fine as it was.
Because the real secret, the real thing he had, was a magic power that made you dance yourself to glory.
Whop bop b-luma b-lop bam bom! ■
63
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Yet, tempting as it is to conclude that the president’s failures bear most of the blame for covid-19’s spread
through America, the reality is more complicated
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That America and Europe have fared similarly in the pandemic does not absolve Mr Trump. This is the first
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international crisis since 1945 in which America has not only spurned global leadership but, by cutting funds
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to the World Health Organisation, actively undermined a co-ordinated international response. That
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matters, as does Mr Trump’s inability to cleave to a consistent message or to speak to the country in words
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that do not enrage half of the population. Yet four years after Mr Trump was elected, the time to be
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surprised by his behaviour has long gone. Luckily, he has mattered less than most Americans think.■
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The simple picture that President Donald Trump paints of America and China locked in confrontation suits
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China’s rulers well. The party thinks that the balance of power is shifting in China’s favour. Mr Trump’s
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insults feed Chinese nationalist anger, which the party is delighted to exploit—just as it does any tensions
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between America and its allies. It portrays the democracy movement in Hong Kong as an American plot.
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That is absurd, but it helps explain many mainlanders’ scorn for Hong Kong’s protesters.
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This week the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declared that “facts on the ground” show Hong Kong is no
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longer autonomous. This allows America to slap tariffs on the territory’s exports, as it already does to those
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from the mainland. That is a powerful weapon, but the scope for miscalculation is vast, potentially harming
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Hong Kongers and driving out global firms and banks. It would be better, as the law also proposes, to impose
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sanctions on officials who abuse human rights in Hong Kong. Also, Britain should grant full residency rights
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to the hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers who hold a kind of second-class British passport—much as
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Ms Tsai this week opened Taiwan’s door to Hong Kong citizens. None of this will stop China from imposing
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its will on Hong Kong. The party’s interests always trump the people’s. ■
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GLOBAL TOURISM
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Summer break Foreign adventure, discovery and hedonism are on hold. They will be back
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TOURISM IS THE most popular and least controversial form of globalisation. For those travelling abroad it
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promises an infinite variety of pleasures, from admiring Titians in Venice to sipping piña coladas in Goa. For
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the host countries it brings in cash—lots of it. The industry accounts for 7% of world exports and 330m jobs.
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But business is on pause (see International section). Ticket sales at Angkor Wat in Cambodia are down by
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99.5% compared with last year and countless Mediterranean sunbeds lie empty. Around the world a vital
question is being asked: what will happen to the summer holidays? The answer is that tourism will be
back—but not in exactly the same form, and only if NIMBYS and governments don’t spoil the fun. Over the
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past half-century the travel industry has grown faster than a beach-bar tab on a sunny afternoon. In 1970
fewer than 200m people went on holiday abroad; last year the figure was 1.5bn. Soaring incomes in China
explain part of the increase. It has also become cheaper to fly and easier to browse for the perfect
swimming pool online—Expedia lists 1m hotels and properties. Visa rules have been loosened. The average
person in the rich world can travel to over 100 countries without a visa, compared with 50 half a century
ago, and the rules have got easier for people in emerging economies, too. As the industry has boomed,
small firms and workers have prospered from the business of holidays. Some 80 countries, including
Tanzania, Thailand and Turkey, rely on tourism for a tenth or more of their exports. These countries’ need
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for foreign exchange means that they are desperate to ensure this summer is not a write-off. Hotel firms
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are keen to fill rooms and younger consumers are prepared to take risks, judging by the packed beaches in
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America on Memorial Day. Nonetheless, caution is warranted. By jamming together people from around
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the world, tourism can be a lethal spreader of the virus. A single bar in an Austrian ski resort may have
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caused outbreaks across Europe, while cruise ships turned into floating biohazards. That means tourism in
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2020 and 2021 will necessarily involve restrictions. One is filtering visitors by nationality. Cyprus plans to
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open on June 9th to most European tourists, but not those from Britain and Russia, two covid-19 hot-spots.
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America has just banned visitors from Brazil. Another fix is lower density. Brian Chesky, the boss of Airbnb,
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reports a surge in bookings for out-of-town dwellings. All told, the number of tourists this summer will be
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a fraction of normal levels. In the long term, supposing a vaccine is found, the picture is brighter. Even if
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some consumers remain nervous, the industry will adapt. Marriott has appointed a cleanliness council and
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is introducing electrostatic disinfectant sprayers; Airbus is working on touchless bathrooms. Better testing
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will give travellers and governments confidence that outbreaks can be managed. The big danger is that
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temporary barriers become hard to remove because of squabbling and lobbying. At the end of April more
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than 150 countries were closed to foreign tourists. Ongoing restrictions include quarantines and
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incompatible tracing apps. History suggests that it is complacent to assume these will just fall away. It took
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a global summit in 1920 to set rules on passports and travel after a world war and Spanish flu closed
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borders—and some western Europeans needed visas to go to America as recently as 1991. Already the
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politics of travel in Asia have caused tensions (see Banyan). Meanwhile, NIMBYS may seek to keep tourists
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out of the world’s most beautiful but busiest cities. This summer should be used to make tourism work
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better. That means taxes and more astute planning to tackle overcrowding. And as the global travel and
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airline industries restructure, there is a chance to speed up the introduction of aircraft with lower carbon
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emissions. It must not take decades before the world returns to the levels of openness that it had as
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recently as January. Tourism makes the world wealthier and happier. It should be on only a temporary
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break.■
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MASKS AND COVID-19

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Face it To help economies restart safely, governments should require people to wear face coverings in
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629 words THE PANDEMIC has not been kind to fashionistas. Shops are closed and online purchases can be
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displayed only through the dismal prism of Zoom. Yet there is a chink of light in this dark sartorial night, for
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it offers the opportunity for self-expression through this season’s latest must-have item: the face mask. The
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fact that the market for chic masks is well-developed in Paris (see Europe section) is hardly surprising, but
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the explanation does not lie only in the exquisite taste of its citizens. Since May 11th Parisians have been
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required to wear masks on public transport or face a penalty of €135 ($150), so it is rare to see anybody on
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the Métro without one. On London’s Tube, by contrast, where the government merely advises people to
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wear one, only around a third of people are doing so. In much of the rich world, governments now require
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people to wear masks when they are in crowded public spaces. Britain and America are among the few
hold-outs. In America, where few states away from the east coast make them compulsory, the issue has
been infected by the polarisation that bedevils the country’s management of the outbreak. That is
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regrettable, for masks could both save lives and allow people to get back to work. People think of masks as
protecting them from nasty stuff in the air. They can do that. But in the case of covid-19, their more
important job is to protect others from an infected wearer. That is because of one of the peculiar
characteristics of this disease: it seems likely that infection by people who have not, or not yet, developed
symptoms accounts for about a third to a half of cases. So even if everybody with symptoms stays at home,
the virus will still spread. Social distancing can help, but is hard to maintain in crowded places. Masks block
the respiratory droplets that carry the virus, so make risky situations safer. In normal times, governments
should require solid evidence, such as a randomised controlled trial in which a treated group is compared
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with a control group, before advocating some new health practice. But these are not normal times, and the
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need for speed makes that impossible. Besides, there are signs that masking is useful. Even home-made
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face-coverings can block spit. Experiments show that a tea towel over the mouth and face can block 60%
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of droplets—not as good as a medical mask, but a great deal better than nothing. That puts to rest the
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concern that advising the public to wear masks will deprive health workers of vital equipment. East Asian
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countries’ success in controlling the disease argues in favour of masks. In many of their cities, masks have
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been worn for years to protect against pollution or disease, so people covered their faces as soon as they
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got wind of covid-19. In the West mask-wearing is alien. And in all of the countries where mask-wearing is
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common practice, the epidemic was swiftly suppressed. This is not incontrovertible evidence in favour of
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masks. Other factors distinguish those mask-wearing countries from bare-faced Western nations: some
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(such as South Korea) had rigorous track-and-trace systems; some (such as Japan) do not shake hands. And
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countries that adopted masks only recently (such as Germany) have successfully suppressed the epidemic.
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Yet the combination of this natural global experiment, laboratory studies and asymptomatic transmission
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suggests that masks can help keep people safe. The clincher is cost. Lockdown destroys economies. Social
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distancing damages them. Masks cost next to nothing. They will not by themselves stop an epidemic. Hand-
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washing, track-and-trace systems and widespread testing are all essential, too. But masks can do their bit
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to protect people and rebuild economies. And they can be stylish.■

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Current evidence suggests that the best thing to have done with that time would have been to get into
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lockdown sooner. Researchers at Columbia University have estimated that if America had implemented its
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social-distancing measures just one week earlier it could have reduced nationwide infections by 62% and
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deaths by 55%.
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A team of economists studying the differences in timing of shelter-in-place orders among states found that
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the average effect of social-distancing orders in America was to reduce caseloads by 44% within three
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weeks—with better results for high-population-density states.

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The divergence between the East and West Coasts of the country shows the difference vividly. Seattle and
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San Francisco were early hotspots but shut down fast—which seems likely to be part of the reason that
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they avoided a meltdown like New York’s, where the unwillingness of Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York
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City, to adhere to the advice of his public-health agency may have lost valuable time. San Francisco has
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seen just 40 deaths, compared with New York’s 21,000.

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Some states might have shut down earlier had they had enough testing capacity to properly evaluate the
spread of the virus.
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A clear, realistic warning from the White House might have concentrated the minds of state governments.
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And the jostling with the FDA could have been avoided had Mr Trump’s administration banged agency
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heads together and insisted on a co-ordinated, purposeful response.
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Eastern European countries are vulnerable for three reasons. First, their economies are export-dependent,
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leaving them at the mercy of demand in other countries. As a proportion of GDP, exports of goods and
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services range from 96% in Slovakia and 85% in Hungary down to 67% in Bulgaria and 61% in Latvia. By way
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of comparison, in Spain the ratio is 35%. A second reason is that eastern European governments have less
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capacity to finance rescue packages. They cannot run large deficits because investors are wary of lending
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to them. Most have low levels of public debt, but their credit ratings tend to be poor. Austria’s debt, as a
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percentage of GDP, is more than three times as high as Bulgaria’s. Yet its bonds are rated AA+ by Standard
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and Poor’s, a ratings agency, while Bulgaria’s are BBB. Finally, many countries in the east rely heavily on
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one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic: tourism. In Croatia, for example, it generates 25% of
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GDP. The WIIW thinks Croatia’s economy will contract by about 11% in 2020.
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With Britain gone, the EU is coalescing. The scheme to issue a mix of grants worth €500bn and loans of
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€250bn to countries struggling with the effects of covid-19 is a step towards a more integrated bloc. Some
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breathlessly compare the move to America’s decision to mutualise debts in 1790. For others, it is less a leap
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than a shuffle: the EU has issued debt in this way before, if on a far smaller scale. In any case, the big
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member states are all on board. France and Germany proposed a plan similar to the European
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Commission’s, while Spain and Italy called for an even more generous one.
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Mercenaries have three main advantages over regular armies. First, they give plausible deniability. Using
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them, a government such as Russia’s can sponsor military action abroad while pretending not to. Second,
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they tend to be efficient, experienced, nimble and flexible. Third, they are cheaper than regular armies.
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Whereas soldiers receive lifelong contracts and pensions, mercenaries are often paid by the job. They are
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also better value for money than the heavy, expensive weaponry that African governments often import,
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which is not much use against terrorists.

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TROUBLED UNIVERSITIES
College blues
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Could a fifth of America’s colleges really face the chop?
804 words CHICAGO MARTYNA MALECKA, a criminology student at Stonehill College, can’t wait for classes
to restart in August. Her campus in Easton, Massachusetts, “feels like a village”: its elegant red-brick
buildings sprawl over 384 bucolic acres. She judges time spent there less of a coronavirus risk than staying
at home in Chicago. Universities everywhere have made valiant efforts to function remotely. A few, such
as California State University, say they will continue teaching only online next year. Ms Malecka doubts that
distance study works. She gets top marks, but laughingly admits she has “no idea” what she has learned
after being at home since March. It is too easy to ignore lecturers who appear by video, she says, and some
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hardly set assignments. Like other students, families and faculty, she craves in-person learning. Whether or
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not universities get back quickly to that, many are likely to suffer. Stonehill is private and Catholic, with
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2,500 students and a $200m endowment. It looks in good shape, but many similar liberal-arts colleges,
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especially in the north-east and Midwest, are not. Their problems are long-standing. Nathan Grawe of
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Carleton College in Minnesota, who researches demography and higher education, says the core difficulty
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is the slipping fertility rate. Overall enrolment has drifted down over the past few years. This squeezes
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smaller colleges hardest. A study by Parthenon-EY, an education consultancy, of over 2,000 colleges
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suggested 800 are so small or inefficient that they may go bust. Around one-fifth run budget deficits. Others
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pile up debts, fail to build sufficient endowments or sustain student numbers only by agreeing to painfully
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big discounts on fees. Mr Grawe points out that eight colleges were already closing each year before the
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pandemic. Those that fail are usually small, among the 40% of higher-education institutions with fewer than
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1,000 students. In the past decade these have seen enrolments slip faster than medium-sized ones. (The
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biggest typically still thrive.) Of the 72 colleges Parthenon found had shut since 2007, almost every one was
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small. They are vulnerable because they depend most on revenue from students; others find ways to hire
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out campuses for conferences, raise research funds, earn bequests and the like. Robert Zemsky of the
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University of Pennsylvania, who co-wrote a recent book on the growing woes of universities, expects a
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“collapse, lots of closures” of smaller colleges, notably in the wider Midwest. He blames both demography
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and teaching methods that do not suit some students, noting how, at many universities, more than a
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quarter of freshmen quit in their first year. Curriculums, he says, are outdated, faculty are out of touch and
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four-year degrees should be cut to three to save costs and force a rethink of higher education. Among the
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most vulnerable colleges are those that cater mostly to non-white students. “African-Americans are more
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than two times as likely to attend an institution at risk, compared with whites and Hispanics,” he says.
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Crystal Nix-Hines, a lawyer in Los Angeles who specialises in the education sector, also expects an
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“enormous winnowing” of historically black colleges. Consolidation of higher education is overdue.

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Students increasingly prefer bigger and more urban institutions, so some smaller, rural ones will go. How
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many? Just before the pandemic, Mr Zemsky and his co-authors suggested that 10% of colleges would
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eventually close. He now expects 20% to shut or merge with others. The pandemic further dims their
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prospects in several ways. Take universities’ efforts to recruit foreign students, who typically pay full fees.
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For each of the past three years, enrolments of foreign undergraduates have slid. A drop in Chinese
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students explains much of that. Travel bans and concern that America has bungled the coronavirus will only
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put off more. The economic slump means some poorer families will not send youngsters to study. Others
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will delay. Funding from states for public universities is certain to fall. A report by Pew Charitable Trusts
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published on May 18th points out that states cut funds for higher education by 29% per student between
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2008 and 2012. This time the slump is likely to be worse. Already Nevada and Ohio say they have plans to
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cut. The University of Michigan has talked of losing out on $1bn. Federal spending will rise ($14bn in
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emergency help went to universities and students under the Cares Act), but is unlikely to make up all the
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shortfall. Finally, many universities face possibly costly legal trouble. Ms Nix-Hines counted 134 lawsuits,
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mostly class-action ones, levied against the “whole gamut” of private and public colleges by late May,
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mostly as students sought the return of tuition fees, saying they received a substandard service online.
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Some colleges might now seek a “liability shield” to protect against future prosecutions before they reopen.
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For universities, it all adds up to “their greatest challenge in history”, she says. That may sound alarmist,
but it is probably true.■
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LEXINGTON
Black America in peril
The vulnerability of African-Americans to the coronavirus is a national emergency
992 words “THE MOST difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health”, wrote the sociologist W.E.B.
Du Bois in 1899, was to understand why so few white Americans were bothered by it. The poor black lives
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Du Bois described in his pioneering study, “The Philadelphia Negro”, were spent “in the most unhealthy
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parts of the city and in the worst houses”, with minimal medical attention. They tended to be sickly and
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short. Yet he could think of “few other cases in the history of civilised peoples where human suffering has
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been viewed with such peculiar indifference.” Modern medicine has since transformed the life expectancy
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of all Americans. But many of the disparities Du Bois observed remain. African-Americans are still the
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country’s poorest, poorest-housed and unhealthiest large group, with high incidences of asthma, diabetes,
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hypertension, cancer and obesity. In 1899 infant mortality was almost twice as high among blacks as among
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whites; now it is 2.2 times higher. If anything, African-American diets are unhealthier now than the rations
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of milk, bread and fried pork Du Bois described. So-called “food deserts” are a modern phenomenon. The
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160,000 people who live in the District of Columbia’s two poorest and overwhelmingly black wards, 7 and
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8, east of the polluted Anacostia river, have only three supermarkets. They also have the sparsest health
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care in the city, with no major hospital. Little wonder blacks have been so stricken by covid-19. The disease
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kills in tandem with the ailments they suffer from the most. The latest data suggest one in 2,000 African-
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Americans has died of it, even though the southern states, where over half live, have been relatively spared.
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Partly for that reason, black Americans are not unusually likely to catch the virus. Yet those who do are 2.4
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times likelier to die than whites and 2.2 times likelier than Asians and Latinos. In Washington, DC, blacks
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are less than 47% of the population, but account for 80% of its 445 coronavirus deaths. A visit to a makeshift
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testing facility in Ward 7, across the river from the Washington Redskins’ crumbling and abandoned former
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stadium, provides a snapshot of this calamity. Bertina, a 64-year-old teacher wearing sweatpants and a
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Redskins’ bandanna (“Don’t photograph me, I look like a bum”) said her aunt had died of the virus in Atlanta
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after three hospitals had refused to admit her. Seventeen-year-old M’Kya said she had heard her brother,
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incarcerated in New York, had the virus. Overweight and sweating heavily, she was visibly unwell; she
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hoped it might be her allergies. The facility, where both women had come to have their nostrils swabbed
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for the virus, is another symptom of a general failure. It was launched three weeks ago as a philanthropic
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endeavour by Howard University—America’s first black medical school—to address a shortage of testing in
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the part of Washington that needs it most. “You can tell things are bad when a dermatologist is running
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covid-19 tests!” said Ginette Okoye, a Howard professor wrapped in a mask, goggles and layers of
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protective clothing. Though there are many causes of black ill-health, the solution probably starts with
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improving blacks’ access to health care. There have been three significant efforts to do so since slavery,
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which all to varying degrees spluttered in the face of a backlash from whites. The first, during
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Reconstruction, was a decade-long effort on behalf of freed slaves, which constituted the first government
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intervention in health care. The second, in 1964-65, was a bundle of laws and edicts, including the passage
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of the civil-rights and Medicaid acts and court rulings to desegregate hospitals. It gave African-Americans
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access to the regular health-care system for the first time. Yet the legacy of Jim Crow remained, as Wards
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7 and 8 illustrate, in a patchy extension of services to black areas—and sometimes worse. Doctors in Macon
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County, Alabama, continued their 40-year “study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male” until 1972. (They
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didn’t tell the 400 sharecroppers under observation that they had syphilis. They told them they had “bad
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blood”.) The advances of the civil-rights period led to a big improvement in black health, which by the mid-
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70s had levelled off. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which followed the example of Medicaid in trying
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to improve the health care of all poor Americans, can be viewed as the third major effort to correct the
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disparity. The 20m Americans who received health insurance under the act were likeliest to be black or
Latino. Yet the fury this elicited among some whites—fuelled by a vague feeling that their tax dollars were
being squandered on the undeserving—helped get Donald Trump elected. Having failed to repeal the act,
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as he had promised to, the president has since sought to shrink it through technical changes. Some dare
hope the pandemic may lead to a fourth push to close the gap. “I’m always optimistic—especially when
there are trillions of dollars circulating,” said Muriel Bowser, Washington’s mayor. African-Americans’
electoral heft might help. Even Mr Trump has been courting their votes; Joe Biden’s health-care plan was
aimed at blacks even before the pandemic struck. Never again Covid-19 has also made clear that such an
intervention should not be considered ideological. Perhaps government action is not the best way to raise
blacks economically, as conservatives argue; but their poor health cannot be improved otherwise. The virus
afflicts the industrious and work-shy alike—a point made by Mr Trump’s trim African-American surgeon-
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general, Jerome Adams, when he acknowledged his own asthma, high blood pressure and heart disease.
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Indeed the most industrious blacks—such as Bertina’s son, labouring in harm’s way at Costco—are likeliest
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to expose themselves and succumb to the virus. Poor black health is a disincentive to work that work alone
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cannot fix. It only remains to be seen, to revert to Du Bois’s difficult problem, whether a majority of
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Americans can be mobilised behind the issue. That must surely be possible, after the vulnerability of
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millions has been so cruelly exposed. If not now, indeed, when?■
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BRAZIL Losing the battle The country entered the pandemic with some advantages. Because of Jair
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Bolsonaro it is squandering them 1161 words SÃO PAULO ON MAY 18TH Bruno Covas, the mayor of São
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Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, announced an unscheduled five-day holiday to discourage people from going
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out. The residents of Paraisópolis, a favela of perhaps 100,000 people in southern São Paulo, where covid-
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19 deaths are rising at a faster rate than anywhere else in the city, saw the festive side. A popcorn vendor
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set up shop to serve the stream of patients entering a clinic. School-aged boys flew kites nearby. “Brazil
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adapted well to this new reality,” joked one, pointing to crowded rooftops and the dancing diamonds
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overhead. Brazil’s covid-19 curve looks like a kite string. On May 28th it had 411,821 confirmed cases and
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25,598 deaths. The United States, the only country with more cases, barred Brazilians from entering from
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May 26th. The World Health Organisation has declared South America “a new epicentre”, with Brazil the
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worst affected country. A study in 133 cities by the Federal University of Pelotas in the southern state of
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Rio Grande do Sul concluded that Brazil’s caseload is seven times the official number. Brazil entered the
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pandemic with strengths. Like the United States it has a federal system. Governors (and mayors) have the
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power to declare lockdowns. Brazil’s free Unified Health System (SUS), modelled on Britain’s National
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Health Service, serves 80% of the population, though poorly in some regions. In earlier crises, such as the
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H1N1 (“swine flu”) epidemic in 2009 and the mosquito-borne Zika outbreak in 2015, the three levels of
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government and the SUS co-operated effectively. More contagious than H1N1, covid-19 exploits Brazil’s
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weaknesses. Rich travellers brought the virus, but it is now concentrated in poor neighbourhoods like
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Paraisópolis, where people are packed together and have jobs without contracts or benefits. That makes
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social distancing hard. A monthly benefit of 600 reais ($110) introduced in April has helped millions of
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informal workers, but long queues of people unable to obtain it are still forming at banks. What makes
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social distancing harder is that Brazil’s populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, scoffs at the medical
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establishment and its advice. He has quarrelled with and lost two health ministers since the crisis began.
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His attitude to covid-19 resembles that of President Donald Trump: both tout hydroxychloroquine, a
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malaria drug that is useless against covid-19 and can be dangerous, according to a new study in the Lancet.
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Mr Bolsonaro’s attitude causes more damage, however. Brazil’s federal system is more president-centred
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than America’s. To work well in a crisis, all levels of government must co-operate. Luiz Henrique Mandetta,
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Brazil’s health minister when the outbreak began, held daily meetings with state and municipal health
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secretaries to plan for getting and distributing money, tests and equipment to combat the pandemic. But
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after Mr Bolsonaro sacked him on April 16th those meetings ended. “The SUS is a three-legged animal,” Mr
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Mandetta says. “If you cut off one of its legs, it starts to go in circles.” Rich states with relatively strong
health systems are coping better. In the state of São Paulo co-ordination among municipal and state health
agencies and the private sector helped open thousands of hospital beds, including in stadiums and
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convention centres. Even so, in the city more than 90% of intensive-care beds are occupied. Douglas
Cardozo, an auxiliary nurse at Hospital do Campo Limpo, south of Paraisópolis, says that staff lack bodysuits
and other necessities. At least 50 patients a day check in with covid-19 symptoms, he says. Two colleagues
have died from it. In poorer regions of Brazil the health system is buckling. Less than a month after the first
covid case was reported on March 13th in Manaus, a city of 2m in the Amazon rainforest, the mayor said
that its system had collapsed. A promised field hospital has failed to materialise and mass graves are being
dug for victims, some of whom are dying on boats en route to the city. The weaker the health system, the
more it needs the protection of strict lockdowns. But Mr Bolsonaro has made these a wedge issue. He
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shows up at weekly protests in Brasília, the capital, against quarantines. Unlike in some European countries,
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Brazilians do not come to their front doors and windows to applaud health workers. Their covid clamour
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signals conflict. When Mr Bolsonaro says something incendiary, his fans drive around blasting car horns in
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approval while his critics bang pots and pans. In municipalities where support for Mr Bolsonaro is strong,
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adherence to social distancing is correspondingly weak, according to a recent paper by Nicolas Ajzenman,
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an economist, and two other authors. This forces governors and mayors to fight on several fronts. Mr
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Bolsonaro mounted a legal challenge to their quarantine orders, which the Supreme Court rejected on April
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15th. João Doria, the centre-right governor of São Paulo state, says that to implement a strict lockdown
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“would mean a clear confrontation with millions of Brazilians” who support Mr Bolsonaro. (Critics say he
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wants to avoid angering businessfolk.) Some Brazilians are merely confused. They ask themselves: “whom
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should I listen to, the governor or the president?” says Mr Doria. This adds to the economic and cultural
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forces that jam people together even as the president divides them. Just half in São Paulo are adhering to
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lockdown rules. To stop the virus’s spread 70% is needed, says the state’s government. On bustling Avenida
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Senador Teotônio Vilela on the city’s southern periphery more than 20 shoppers browse in a variety store,
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ducking in and out under half-lowered metal shutters. Reinildo Carneiro, a construction worker, donned a
lS
puppy-print mask and popped into a bar in Paraisópolis for a game of snooker. “You’re more vulnerable if
ue
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you get depressed from staying at home,” he says. Beer kills the virus, he read on WhatsApp. Mr Bolsonaro
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will not set him straight. His presidency is consumed by melodrama. In a two-hour video of a cabinet
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meeting released by the country’s Supreme Court and watched by millions of Brazilians, he gave himself
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over to unhinged and profanity-filled rants against police investigations of his sons but had little to say
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about protecting citizens from the pandemic. Widespread testing, a precondition for easing lockdowns
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safely, is not happening. By May 26th Brazil had processed fewer than 500,000 tests, just a tenth of the
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number acquired by the health ministry. Its testing rate is far lower than that of European countries and
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the United States. Governors are yielding to pressure anyway. On May 27th Mr Doria announced plans to
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open parts of his state, though not the city of São Paulo. At the city’s São Luis cemetery 3,000 fresh graves
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await covid-19 victims. Several hundred have been filled. The cemetery’s old average of 11 burials a day
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has jumped to more than 40, says a gravedigger. Most graves are covered with flowers but unmarked due
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to a backlog in engraving the plaques. A banner warns about Zika. None is needed for covid-19, says the
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gravedigger. “Once people lose a family member, they finally believe.”■

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BELLO Forwards and backwards Why a president from the 1980s offers lessons for Colombia today 724
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words “IT IS DIFFICULT to find in the recent history of the West a democratic state confronted with such
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serious threats as Colombia was in the mid-1980s.” So writes Malcolm Deas, a British historian, in a
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biography published last year of Virgilio Barco, the country’s president from 1986 to 1990. Colombia had
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the world’s highest murder rate, as Pablo Escobar and his drug-trafficking friends ran amok, slaughtering
Ex
judges, journalists and ministers. The state’s writ did not run in many rural areas, where the FARC and other
W
left-wing guerrillas battled right-wing paramilitaries, all financing themselves from extortion, kidnapping or
SO
cocaine. With Colombian politics suffering from a surfeit of veto players, from ex-presidents to business
lobbies, academics began to talk of a “blocked society”. Barco began the unblocking. He ended a cosy
power-sharing arrangement between his Liberal party and the Conservatives and set in motion the writing
71
of a new constitution. He correctly identified the narcos as a more pressing threat than the guerrillas, with
some of whom he made peace. He began to strengthen a weak state and launched a development
programme for conflict-ridden areas. Several of his successors continued his work. In this century Álvaro
Uribe, a right-winger, expanded the army, caused the paramilitaries to disband (formally, at least) and beat
back the FARC, allowing Juan Manuel Santos to conclude a peace agreement in 2016. Outwardly, Colombia
is in much better shape today. Violence has fallen steeply. Colombians are less poor, healthier and better
educated than they were in the 1980s. Between them the current president, Iván Duque, big-city mayors
and the health service have coped well with covid-19. Colombia has recorded 16 deaths per million people,
an
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compared with 120 in Peru and 44 in Chile. The hospitals have spare beds, allowing the government to ease
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its lockdown. Mr Duque, who is sponsored by Mr Uribe, has seen his approval rating rise from 23% in
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February to 52% in April. Yet he would be rash to relax. Peace has allowed new aspirations: mass protests
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last year focused on better education and pensions. But Colombia’s progress has all but halted since the
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peace agreement, and in some ways before that. Many crucial issues, from judicial reform to tackling
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corruption, have been shirked. There are new worries. Partly because it has never managed to raise enough
W
SO
taxes, Colombia has been less ambitious in trying to offset the covid-19 recession than Peru or Chile. With
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poverty and unemployment surging, discontent is bound to return. This is all the more worrying because
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the security forces seem to be losing their grip. Earlier this month a dozen officers were fired after it was
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revealed that army intelligence spied on opposition politicians, journalists, activists and even a senior aide
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to Mr Duque. The dictatorial regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela claims, plausibly, to have infiltrated
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Colombian intelligence. Meanwhile, a Mexican drug “cartel” and assorted armed groups are running free
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on the Pacific coast. Some of Mr Duque’s opponents accuse him, in part unfairly, of failing to implement
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the peace agreement. “The big complaint is not peace, it’s security,” says a former defence official. “It’s
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what they were supposed to be good at.” The peace agreement offered the chance to shrink the army,
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expand the police and concentrate on bringing the rule of law to rural areas. Instead, Mr Duque’s
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government has allowed the army to become politicised, and has failed to exercise civilian oversight of it.
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Mr Duque is young, personable and a good orator. But Mr Uribe controls his party. The government’s
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achievements include absorbing 1.8m Venezuelan migrants, a law to get broadband to rural areas and, so
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far, coping with covid-19. But with more than half his four-year term still to go, they risk being wiped out
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by recession and, with it, a probable rebound in crime. As for Barco, he was an unlikely leader. An engineer,
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educated at MIT when few Colombians studied abroad, he seemed distant, was a poor communicator and,
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many said, an inept politician. But having worked his way up in the Liberal party, he had much political and
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government experience. He quietly emancipated himself from his predecessors and his party’s bosses, kept
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his distance from business lobbies and was his own man with a clear programme, writes Mr Deas. In all
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those things, Mr Duque would do well to emulate him.

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TRAVEL AFTER COVID

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Lonely planet
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Tourists are locked down at home. What awaits them when they re-emerge?
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2217 words
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HEATHROW AND PROVENCE MOST STRIKING is the absence—of cars outside the building, of people inside
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it, of any activity at all. So astonished was Alaba, an Uber driver, as he approached Heathrow airport on a
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Saturday morning in May that he circled the final roundabout twice, crying, “This can’t be Heathrow.” Inside
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an employee stood ready to hand out facemasks, with no one to give them to. The vast check-in hall was
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nearly deserted. Just one lane at security was operating. Many of the lights were off. The departures board
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showed six flights for the entire day. International travel has all but stopped. Borders are closed. Hotels are
SO
empty. In April last year 6.8m passengers passed through Heathrow. This April just over 200,000 did—fewer
than a pandemic-less daily average. Flight movements across Europe are down by nearly 85% (see chart 1).
In America the Transportation Security Administration screened 3.2m passengers in its airports last month,
72
down from 70m during the same period last year. Some countries, such as India, stopped all road and rail
transport, grounded all flights and shuttered airports. And as countries creak open, they are picking and
choosing which nationalities to allow in. The old rules have gone out of the window. And so for many 2020
will be a year without holidays. The fear of disease will keep people at home. Travel is already a luxury.
Even in rich Europe, with its generous holiday entitlements, three in ten cannot afford a week’s annual
holiday away from home. Those who have lost jobs or who are worried about recessions may cut travel
from their budgets. For those who still dream of foreign beaches, the biggest obstacle will be getting
anywhere. Many restrictions—including border closures and quarantines post-arrival—are still in place.
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Tourism is a giant of the global economy. People went on 1.4bn foreign trips in 2018, twice the number in
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2000 (see chart 2). In that time a rich-country habit became a global one. Such was the scramble to attract
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tourists, countries started projecting themselves as global travel brands (think Incredible India! or Epic
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Estonia). By the industry’s reckoning, 330m jobs—from well-paid airline pilots to tour guides and
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dishwashers working unseen in expensive resorts—depend on travellers. Many of those are local; about
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three-quarters of all tourism in rich countries is within national borders, according to the OECD, a club of
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mostly rich countries. The health of national exchequers, as well as the shape of sectors from restaurants
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to hotels and luxury goods (which are often bought while people are on holiday), will depend on what
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tourism looks like when it is allowed to resume. Hotels and airlines are using the upheaval as an opportunity
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to rework how they function. Families are rethinking how and where they can safely take their holidays.
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Many of the changes will last only until a vaccine for covid-19 appears. But some will stick. How people
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start to travel in 2020—or 2021—will shape how they travel for years thereafter. In normal times
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international tourists spend $1.6trn each year—more than Spain’s GDP. The jobs tourism creates cannot
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be offshored, and often appear in places where few other opportunities exist. A Barcelona bar selling
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sangria to a German tourist may not look like an exporter, but its impact on the national accounts is much
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the same as if it had shipped the bottle north. In fact as a source of global export revenues, tourism is bigger
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than the food or car industries. The travel bug But forecasts for 2020 range from the abysmal to the
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apocalyptic. The UN World Tourism Organisation predicts a fall in international travel spending of $910bn-
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1.2trn this year. It predicts that arrivals will tumble by 60-80%. Of the 217 destinations the body tracks, 72%
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have closed their borders to international tourists. Europe will be hit especially hard. It receives over half
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of the world’s tourists every year. Most are due to arrive soon. More than other tourism hotspots, summers
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are vital: 59% of all tourism-related receipts in Greece are booked from July to September. Tourism is a rare
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example of an industry where southern Europeans outshine (and often host) their northern counterparts.
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Some are taking tentative steps towards reopening. Greece and Italy hope to welcome international
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tourists this summer. Regional “travel bubbles” are being considered in parts of Europe and Oceania (see
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Banyan). But many would-be travellers will have to stay in their own countries. In South Korea, which never
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locked down entirely, three-quarters of all planned trips by air in April were domestic, compared with a
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tenth normally, according to Skyscanner, a price-comparison website. Around the world car-rental searches
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are up, too. According to Airbnb, a home-rental website, domestic bookings everywhere have more than
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doubled, to 30% of total reservations. Even more striking, many people are booking properties within 50
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miles (80km) of where they live. Being able to drive home is useful if lockdown conditions change suddenly.
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Travelling within China, which was the first country to impose a lockdown and now appears to have its
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outbreak largely under control, is returning to something close to normality. But even in America, which is
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still reporting more than 20,000 fresh cases every day, the first weekend of May saw spikes in hotel
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occupancy, according to Keith Barr of IHG, a hotel group that includes the InterContinental and Holiday Inn
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chains. “The level of demand surprised me. I didn’t think anybody would be travelling right now,” he says.
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Given closed borders, the demand is all domestic. For now European leaders, from Italy to France, are
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hoping that locals who cannot leave will replace foreigners who cannot enter. That might work, to some
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extent and in some countries. But many tourist hotspots, like Iceland or Caribbean islands, have too few
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locals to replace absent foreigners. Malta, which each year hosts nearly six foreign visitors for every native,
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might get a quarter of the 2.9m tourists it attracted last year, reckons Johann Buttigieg of the Malta Travel
Authority—if its borders reopen in time for summer. Residents of countries that export more tourists than
they receive, such as Britain, South Korea and Germany, will struggle to squeeze onto their own beaches.
73
Even more “balanced” countries, like the Netherlands, will struggle to slot domestic tourists into the gap
left by foreigners: a pricey Airbnb overlooking an Amsterdam canal is more appealing to a New Yorker than
to a stranded Rotterdammer. Backpacker hostels, which are as charming to skint foreign youngsters as they
are unappealing to locals, are in for a tough spell. Camping grounds attracting relatively local caravaners
will do better. Meanwhile, urban destinations have fallen out of favour—why go to New York if Broadway
is closed? Rural getaways by contrast are in demand. IHG’s busiest hotels are ones situated by beaches.
STR, a travel-research firm, says occupancy rates at some seaside spots in America’s south were as high as
60%. That might lead to what Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s boss, calls travel redistribution: people taking trips to
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out-of-the-way places rather than the usual metropolises. Airbnb, which can offer rooms almost anywhere,
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was already banking on a trend for people to move off the beaten track and save money by shunning tourist
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hotspots. That trend has become turbocharged. Mr Chesky says he used to think it would take 20-30 years
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for travellers’ habits to change. Now he thinks it will happen in mere weeks or months. Upending the
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world’s travel habits even for a few months will have long-term effects. If tourists discover the virtues of
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new locations, they will want to return. People are either looking for flights far further into the future or
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SO
far closer to now—not so much last-minute as last-second travel, jokes Luca Romozzi of Sojern, a travel
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consultancy. Booking (and paying) later will change the business model of airlines and hotels, which have
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long bankrolled themselves with customers’ advance payments. Worse, most travel vendors now have to
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agree to flexible cancellation terms if they are to attract any kind of custom. You can turn this world around
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The economics of providing travel services will change in other ways. Making things easier to clean and
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reducing touchpoints will be priorities. Hotels are ditching carpets in favour of bare floors. Throw cushions
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are being thrown out. Restaurant menus will probably become digital or appear on chalkboards. Kitchens
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will offer fewer dishes, to simplify the cooking process and to avoid wasting stocked ingredients in case of
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more enforced closures. Other disappearances will be more noticeable. The buffet has probably seen its
lS
last supper. Check-in will be automated. “We obviously still want to provide a welcome, but actually
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printing a key is just a transaction. That’s not really a welcome,” says Arne Sorenson of Marriott, the world’s
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biggest hotel chain. Expect mobile check-in, room keys on phones and more voice-activated room controls.
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Such proposals are part of an immediate reaction to the pandemic—in-your-face health measures that form
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a sort of “hygiene theatre”. Countries such as Greece are selling themselves as less infected by covid-19. A
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Portuguese minister boasted of its wonderful nurses should travellers fall ill there, such as the one who
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tended to Boris Johnson, the British prime minister. Using health and hygiene as marketing tools is a return
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to old form. Richard Clarke of Bernstein, a research firm, notes that an ad for Holiday Inn from the 1970s
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emphasised cleanliness as the chain’s main selling point, ahead of location and comfort. It will come to the
ue
fore again, to the benefit of big brands. People may put up with spartan digs if they know they have been
an
m
thoroughly disinfected. Marriott now boasts of a “Global Cleanliness Council”. Airports will also emphasise
Em
hygiene. “I think the move to minimising contact during any travel experience will just push us over the
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edge to having a contactless journey,” says John Holland-Kaye, Heathrow’s chief. “Once you get into the
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terminal, you’ll scan your passport, have an image of your face taken, drop your bags,” and then stroll
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through checkpoints as cameras use facial recognition to open gates. Some of this may sound far-fetched,
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but citizens of some three dozen countries can already use e-gates to get through passport control on
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arrival at Heathrow and many other airports, allowing them to go from gate to kerb without talking to
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another person. Security will still involve slowing down, but even there it should soon be possible to leave
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laptops and liquids inside the bag. Automation will reduce the need to touch trays. Hand-sanitiser is already
m
Em
everywhere. Once implemented, such changes are unlikely to be undone. By contrast the in-flight
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experience may change much less in the long term. Observant travellers will notice tweaks. In-flight
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magazines will probably disappear. Meal services may be reduced to bags of snacks and bottles of water
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for a while. Stuck in the middle with you But crucial things—such as the middle seat on airplanes—will not
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disappear. Airlines are clear that it would destroy their business model, which requires around two-thirds
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of seats to be filled to make a profit. “We don’t think it is necessary and either we don’t fly or we have to
SO
increase prices by 45-50%, or 100% for some” airlines, says Alexandre de Juniac of the International Air
Transport Association, aviation’s main trade body. Lower fuel costs will help somewhat with operational
expenses, but airlines also have high fixed costs. Instead, Mr de Juniac advocates a globally co-ordinated
74
system of checks and safety measures that include health declarations from passengers, temperature
checks at departure and arrival points, widespread use of facemasks and enhanced cleaning of aircraft.
Some of these changes will endure and could increase costs. Adding several cabin cleanings a day will
reduce the number of flights a single plane and crew can fly. This is particularly harmful to low-cost airlines,
whose business models rely on quick turnarounds. Not all these changes will be universal. People have
diverse tastes, different reasons to travel and varying appetites for risk. Budgets also dictate their choice of
destination and activity. Americans who might have gone to the Caribbean will have to make do with
Florida. Chinese luxury-shoppers can turn to high-end malls at home. But Scottish sun-seekers or Saudis
an
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escaping the desert summer will want to get back on planes. The poshest travellers, who can afford first-
Em
class flights and private suites, will have less reason to fear disease. Places that appeal to a mostly younger
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crowd will probably function as close to normal as possible within governmental guidelines. Nobody wants
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to go to a socially distanced nightclub. Giant cruise-liners carrying thousands of often-old people will take
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longer to recover their appeal—if they ever do. They guaranteed a steady flow of visitors to islands with
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few other sources of hard currency. A dozen countries rely on tourism to generate over 60% of their export
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SO
income, according to the UN’s parasol counters, all of them renowned for their beaches. The Caribbean has
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seen a slew of credit-rating downgrades as a result. If travel curbs do not ease before the crucial winter
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season, downgrades will translate into defaults. Much attention has been lavished in recent years on the
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problems of overtourism for a handful of superstar cities such as Venice and Barcelona. But most
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destinations have found a happy balance between tourism and normal life. It is those places that will feel
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its absence hardest. As Mr Buttigieg says, speaking from a deserted Malta, “Nobody realised how important
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tourism was until it was gone.” ■
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BARTLEBY
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From BC to AD
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Working life has entered a new era

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759 words
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ON MARCH 16TH Bartleby left the offices of The Economist to head home. That was the last day when all
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editorial staff assembled in our London redoubt. And, at the time of writing, no date for a return to the
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office is in sight. It is remarkable how quickly we have adapted. The newspaper has been written, edited
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and produced from couches and kitchen tables. January and February seem like an ancient era—the BC
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(before coronavirus) to the new AD (after domestication). The shift may rival great workplace
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transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Twitter has already said that all its employees will be
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allowed to work from home permanently and Facebook expects half its staff to do so within a decade. It
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has been a much more sudden transition than occurred with factories. Steam power meant they were
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designed around one great power system, complete with belts and pulleys that snaked through the
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building. A failure at some point in the system meant the whole thing might grind to a halt. Then
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electrification allowed individual machines to have their own power source. But it took half a century from
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the introduction of electricity in the 1880s before factories were reconfigured to take advantage of the new
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power source. The current, rapid shift to AD was enabled by preconditions. First, broadband services are
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today quick enough to allow for document downloads and videoconferencing. Second, advanced
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economies revolve around services, not manufacturing. Back in the 1970s, when Britain adopted a three-
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day week (to combat a miners’ strike), there were power cuts and TV stations had to close down early. In
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other words, home life was severely affected as well. The pandemic has not turned the lights off. Not only
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that, it has made remote work seem both normal and acceptable. In the past employees who stayed home
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had to overcome the suspicion that they were bunking off. Now those who insist on being at the office
SO
sound self-important. Things are missing, of course. Video calls lack the spontaneity of a normal meeting;
no off-the-cuff remarks to lighten the mood. Distance makes it difficult to generate camaraderie. Creativity
is probably harder to foster. Octavius Black of Mindgym, a consultancy, says new ideas come from weak
75
links in networks—ie, people you meet occasionally. Such “casual collisions” have become rarer. Yet
although offices will not disappear, it is hard to imagine that working life will return to BC ways. For more
than a century workers have stuffed themselves onto crowded trains and buses, or endured traffic jams, to
get into the office, and back, five days a week. For the past two months they have not had to commute,
and will have enjoyed the hiatus. Employers, for their part, have maintained expensive digs in city centres
because they needed to gather staff in one place. The rent is only part of the cost; there is the cleaning,
lighting, printers, catering and security on top. When you work at home, you pay for your own utilities and
food. Many businesses and employees may thus have had their “Wizard of Oz” moment: the corporate HQ
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is shown to be an old man behind the curtain. Faith in the centralised office may never be restored. Another
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aspect of the AD era may be the disappearance of the five-day working week. Even before the pandemic
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many workers became used to taking phone calls or answering emails at the weekend. In the AD era the
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barrier between home and working life, a useful way of relieving stress, will be even harder to sustain. It
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may be lost altogether. Without the Monday-to-Friday commute, the weekend seems a more nebulous
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concept, as does the 9-to-5 working day. In future employees may work and take breaks when they please,
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with the company video call the only fixture. The downside, however, is that the rhythm of life has been
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disrupted and new routines are needed: as Madness, a British pop group, sang about school in “Baggy
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Trousers”, people are reduced to “trying different ways to make a difference to the days”. Looking further
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out, the AD era may bring other changes. Some may decide to live in small towns where housing costs are
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lower, since they have no need to commute. Men will have fewer excuses to skip cleaning or child care if
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they are not disappearing to the office. In a sense, this is a return to normal: until the 19th century most
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people worked at or close to their homes. But social historians may still regard 2020 as the start of a new
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age.
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76

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2020.05 Le Meilleur de The Economist Mai 2020

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Le meilleur de The Economist – mai 2020

- BRITAIN’S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION

a unique chance to do so / Once more, with renewables

into a covid-accelerated decline

- Global tourism / Travel after covid (top !)

- Masks and covid-19

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1545 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 00:32:17

No more pencils, no more books

Dutch primary schools will partially reopen on May 11th.■

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1609 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 00:36:29

countries. Right now the world is getting the opposite.■

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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 363-368 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 09:22:07

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 421-425 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 10:03:02

enable them to work from home or to retrain for other jobs.

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 425-429 | Ajouté le vendredi 1 mai 2020 10:03:52

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 457-474 | Ajouté le samedi 2 mai 2020 08:57:42

- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 617-635 | Ajouté le samedi 2 mai 2020 09:12:10

sentenced to flogging, but some are still beheaded with a sword.

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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 1957-1968 | Ajouté le samedi 2 mai 2020 09:36:53

has urged private lenders to show forbearance too.

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 2152 | Ajouté le samedi 2 mai 2020 09:43:01

sense 764 words WHY STUDY classical languages?

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

get to grips with what is happening in care homes.” ■

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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 569-570 | Ajouté le dimanche 17 mai 2020 07:38:36

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 801 | Ajouté le lundi 18 mai 2020 07:20:10

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1089 | Ajouté le mardi 19 mai 2020 07:35:14

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY The social experiment

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 85 | Ajouté le mardi 19 mai 2020 08:39:57

THE EU’S BAD CRISIS

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 133 | Ajouté le mardi 19 mai 2020 08:50:25

THE WORLD ECONOMY Goodbye globalization

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 490 | Ajouté le mercredi 20 mai 2020 08:00:46

should borrow it,” says Lord Jay.■

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- Votre surlignement à lʼemplacement 742-744 | Ajouté le mercredi 20 mai 2020 23:20:31

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

- Extrait à lʼemplacement 922 | Ajouté le jeudi 21 mai 2020 08:29:49

SOCIAL MOBILITY Is zipcode destiny?

Two leading economists disagree about the flagging American Dream

cannot be moved to opportunity. Mr Heckman’s project of encouraging early-childhood education has

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- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1294 | Ajouté le jeudi 21 mai 2020 08:40:33

- Extrait à lʼemplacement 1494 | Ajouté le jeudi 21 mai 2020 08:57:38

CRIME AND COVID-19

The pandemic is providing organised crooks with fresh opportunities

The Economist - EU Edition (The Economist)

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