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The Economist Articles for May. 3rd week : May. 19th(Interpretation)
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Leaders | The new economic order
The liberal international order is slowly coming apart
Its collapse could be sudden and irreversible
At first glance, the world economy looks reassuringly resilient. America has boomed even as its trade war with China has escalated. Germany has withstood the loss of Russian gas supplies without suffering an economic disaster. War in the Middle East has brought no oil shock. Missile-firing Houthi rebels have barely touched the global flow of goods. As a share of global gdp, trade has bounced back from the pandemic and is forecast to grow healthily this year.
Look deeper, though, and you see fragility. For years the order that has governed the global economy since the second world war has been eroded. Today it is close to collapse. A worrying number of triggers could set off a descent into anarchy, where might is right and war is once again the resort of great powers. Even if it never comes to conflict, the effect on the economy of a breakdown in norms could be fast and brutal.
As we report, the disintegration of the old order is visible everywhere. Sanctions are used four times as much as they were during the 1990s; America has recently imposed “secondary” penalties on entities that support Russia’s armies. A subsidy war is under way, as countries seek to copy China’s and America’s vast state backing for green manufacturing. Although the dollar remains dominant and emerging economies are more resilient, global capital flows are starting to fragment, as our special report explains.
The institutions that safeguarded the old system are either already defunct or fast losing credibility. The World Trade Organisation turns 30 next year, but will have spent more than five years in stasis, owing to American neglect. The imf is gripped by an identity crisis, caught between a green agenda and ensuring financial stability. The un security council is paralysed. And, as we report, supranational courts like the International Court of Justice are increasingly weaponised by warring parties. Last month American politicians including Mitch McConnell, the leader of Republicans in the Senate, threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions if it issues arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel, which also stands accused of genocide by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
So far fragmentation and decay have imposed a stealth tax on the global economy: perceptible, but only if you know where to look. Unfortunately, history shows that deeper, more chaotic collapses are possible—and can strike suddenly once the decline sets in. The first world war killed off a golden age of globalisation that many at the time assumed would last for ever. In the early 1930s, following the onset of the Depression and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, America’s imports collapsed by 40% in just two years. In August 1971 Richard Nixon unexpectedly suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold; only 19 months later, the Bretton Woods system of fixed-exchange rates fell apart.
Today a similar rupture feels all too imaginable. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with his zero-sum worldview, would continue the erosion of institutions and norms. The fear of a second wave of cheap Chinese imports could accelerate it. Outright war between America and China over Taiwan, or between the West and Russia, could cause an almighty collapse.
In many of these scenarios, the loss will be more profound than many people think. It is fashionable to criticise untrammelled globalisation as the cause of inequality, the global financial crisis and neglect of the climate. But the achievements of the 1990s and 2000s—the high point of liberal capitalism—are unmatched in history. Hundreds of millions escaped poverty in China as it integrated into the global economy. The infant-mortality rate worldwide is less than half what it was in 1990. The percentage of the global population killed by state-based conflicts hit a post-war low of 0.0002% in 2005; in 1972 it was nearly 40 times as high. The latest research shows that the era of the “Washington consensus”, which today’s leaders hope to replace, was one in which poor countries began to enjoy catch-up growth, closing the gap with the rich world.
The decline of the system threatens to slow that progress, or even throw it into reverse. Once broken, it is unlikely to be replaced by new rules. Instead, world affairs will descend into their natural state of anarchy that favours banditry and violence. Without trust and an institutional framework for co-operation, it will become harder for countries to deal with the 21st century’s challenges, from containing an arms race in artificial intelligence to collaborating in space. Problems will be tackled by clubs of like-minded countries. That can work, but will more often involve coercion and resentment, as with Europe’s carbon border-tariffs or China’s feud with the imf. When co-operation gives way to strong-arming, countries have less reason to keep the peace.
In the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin or other cynics, a system in which might is right would be nothing new. They see the liberal order not as an enactment of lofty ideals but an exercise of raw American power—power that is now in relative decline.
Gradually, then suddenly
It is true that the system established after the second world war achieved a marriage between America’s internationalist principles and its strategic interests. Yet the liberal order also brought vast benefits to the rest of the world. Many of the world’s poor are already suffering from the inability of the imf to resolve the sovereign-debt crisis that followed the covid-19 pandemic. Middle-income countries such as India and Indonesia hoping to trade their way to riches are exploiting opportunities created by the old order’s fragmentation, but will ultimately rely on the global economy staying integrated and predictable. And the prosperity of much of the developed world, especially small, open economies such as Britain and South Korea, depends utterly on trade. Buttressed by strong growth in America, it may seem as if the world economy can survive everything that is thrown at it. It can’t. ■
Asia | Out of the blue
India has quietly transformed its ports
That is good for trade, and a good sign for reform
photograph: getty images
May 9th 2024|nhava sheva
If there is one thing about which both supporters and critics of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, can agree, it is that his biggest achievement has been to overhaul India’s infrastructure. Tens of thousands of miles of motorways have been built, fast intercity trains have been waved off, dozens of urban metro lines have opened and more Indians fly on more aircraft through more airports than ever before. These are impressive feats.
There is deeper transformation going on behind the scenes, too, in sectors with which most Indians have no direct contact but which affect their lives all the same. One of these is ports, which have seen huge improvements in capacity and efficiency. This is crucial for India’s economic aims: Mr Modi’s government harbours ambitions of making India a manufacturing and export hub as well as a node in global supply chains. World-class ports are necessary to realise those goals. The maritime sector accounts for 95% of India’s trade by volume and 65% by value.
map: the economist
Enormous progress has been made. At what the government classifies as its “major ports”—a dozen of them—capacity has more than doubled in the past decade from 745m tonnes to over 1,600m. Traffic at these ports (see map), which handle more than half of India’s trade, jumped by 46% to 795m tonnes in the ten years to 2023. Turnaround time, or the number of hours between the arrival and departure of a cargo ship, has plummeted from 127 hours in 2010-11 to 53 hours ten years later (see chart). India rose from 54th in the World Bank’s “logistics performance index” a decade ago to 38th last year.
For an example, look to Nhava Sheva, across the harbour from the old docks of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (jnpa) was commissioned in 1989 as a modern facility to handle high-volume container traffic and take lorries off the streets of the city. It is India’s most efficient public port. Turnaround times average around 21 hours, even though it accounts for half of India’s container traffic and a quarter of the customs revenue at major ports.
chart: the economist
The sea-change at jnpa and other public ports is a result of three important policies. In 1996 the government allowed the private sector to participate in building and running ports. At the same time it encouraged public ones to move to a “landlord model”, with the port authority providing common services such as tugboats and pilots while leaving cargo operations to private firms. Today jnpa’s five container terminals are all run by private operators, including Dubai’s dp World and Denmark’s Maersk. Others among the major ports have followed suit. Private competitors such as Mundra, run by the Adani conglomerate, have forced public ones to improve their standards too. “The days are gone when the chairman and traffic-department heads made the shipping lines wait outside,” says B. Swaminathan of the Indian Maritime University in Chennai.
Second, the transport upgrade has been backed up by less visible changes. India’s port-planning used to revolve around ensuring enough capacity to import grain to feed its people, says Unmesh Sharad Wagh, jnpa’s chairman. But in recent years the focus has shifted to logistics. Electronic tolling and a national tax regime have made moving goods easier and faster. One of two new rail lines intended solely for freight is complete. The government aims to cut the cost of logistics from around 8% of gdp to 5%.
The third element is modernising India’s customs department. At jnpa 90% of consignments are not physically inspected and more than 80% are cleared without the need for scans. The goal, says Rajesh Pandey, the chief commissioner of customs at jnpa, is to raise that second number to 90%, speeding up the movement of goods.
Deep thoughts
India’s maritime industry still punches below its weight globally. Despite some 7,500km of coastline and over 200 ports, the country accounted for only 2.4% of global container traffic in 2021. That is about the same as the United Arab Emirates (2.3%) and far less than Singapore (4.5%). These are not manufacturing superpowers, but they are major hubs for trans-shipment. India is planning a big hub at Galathea Bay in the Nicobar Islands, located near one of the world’s most important shipping routes. The location is “God’s gift to India”, says Vinayak Chatterjee of the Infravision Foundation, a think-tank.
Last year the government outlined its ambitions for the maritime sector by 2047, by which time Mr Modi has promised to make India a “developed country”. These include quadrupling overall port capacity to 10bn tonnes, becoming a leading shipbuilder and creating two new trans-shipment hubs. Experts question whether India really needs such hubs. But it is clear that India’s trade infrastructure could improve. Its ports are not very prominent on global shipping routes. It also needs deeper ports to cater to bigger vessels.
jnpa, which will soon run out of space to expand, is planning a new port at Vadhvan, 130km north of Mumbai. It will be built on a man-made island off the coast and will be deep enough to accommodate some of the biggest ships in the world. But building a port is the easy part. Connectivity to the interior is still patchy. Coastal shipping is minimal. Customs processes have reduced the amount of time imports sit at docks but much less so for exports.
The success of these policies matters for reasons greater than just boosting trade. India’s politicians are often criticised for focusing on visible outcomes. But fixing infrastructure most voters do not see and simplifying rules most do not consider show that the state is capable of enacting deeper reform. If India can do it with ports, that is a hopeful sign that it can do it with other parts of the economy, too. ■
China | Chaguan
In today’s China, to get rich is perilous
Business sectors can be praised one day and banned the next
illustration: chloe cushman
May 9th 2024
Since china re-embraced capitalism decades ago, rich rewards have flowed to entrepreneurs who understand what the Communist Party wants. Today grasping what the party dislikes may be a more precious skill. This is an era when leaders’ priorities can change overnight. When the winds turn, entrepreneurs need to curb their ambitions without complaint.
Ningxia, a poor western region, is a good place to observe this trend. A decade ago Ningxia’s government announced plans to “go global” and “seize the commanding heights” of domestic and foreign markets for meat and dairy products that are halal, or in line with Islamic food laws. As dreams go, this was not especially fantastical. Though much of Ningxia is arid grasslands, the region is home to big dairy companies and sheep and cattle producers. Just over a third of its 7.3m-strong population are Hui Muslims, Chinese-speaking descendants of long-ago migrants from Arabia, Persia and Central Asia. Many local Hui shun pork and alcohol and eat products approved by the region’s religious-affairs bureau as qingzhen. The term is Chinese for “pure and true” and can mean both halal and Islamic (mosques are known as qingzhen temples).
Ningxia officials built a halal industrial park with room for hundreds of companies in Wuzhong, a majority-Muslim city of 1.4m people. Showing keen political instincts, officials tied these plans to the Belt and Road Initiative (bri), Xi Jinping’s globe-spanning infrastructure scheme. The bri was designed in part to link backwaters such as Ningxia to new markets in Eurasia. In 2015 Ningxia’s government urged firms making halal food and Islamic clothing to “firmly grasp the strategic opportunities” of the bri by deepening ties with Muslim countries in the Middle East as well as Central and South-East Asia. That same year local officials set a target for the output of Wuzhong’s halal industrial park to hit a whopping 30bn yuan by 2020 ($4.2bn at current exchange rates).
Propaganda outlets held up Hui entrepreneurs as model workers. In 2016 the Guangming Ribao, a newspaper under the control of the party’s central committee, profiled the Yang Haji Halal Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Industrial Development Company, a producer of animal feed in the rural county of Tongxin. Its founder, Yang Jian, whose honorific “Haji” denotes a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca, described how he guaranteed halal traceability for every sack of feed leaving his factory. The market potential was “huge”, the writers reported, lamenting that so few Chinese halal firms had international brands.
Looking back, 2016 marked a high point of official enthusiasm for halal exports. That same year saw central authorities in Beijing reject calls to enshrine Islamic food rules in China’s legal code. Enacting national regulations was a long-standing request from halal-food companies, who complained that many foreign Muslim countries mistrusted products from atheist, pork-eating China.
Seemingly shutting down such debate, Mr Xi called on officials to maintain a strict separation between religion and the secular state. He also called for Islam and other foreign religions to be “sinicised”. State-approved scholars warned against qingzhen fanhua (pan-halal tendencies). Over the next few years Ningxia and other provinces with large Hui communities abolished many halal regulations and made Muslim restaurants remove Arabic signs. Chinese-speaking Hui regions were mostly spared the ferocious security campaigns imposed on Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Still, Ningxia saw protests when mosques were stripped of domes and minarets and given Chinese-style roofs.
Chaguan visited Ningxia recently. Arriving unannounced at the former Yang Haji halal food plant in Tongxin, he found the company merged with a Xinjiang firm, Tycoon Group, and renamed Ronghua, or Glory to China. Large red characters on a factory wall read: “Listen to the Party, Be Grateful to the Party, Follow the Party”. Waiting in Mr Yang’s office for him to return from a meeting, your columnist was joined by a clutch of officials led by Liu Yan, head of the county’s propaganda department. “Were you at the mosque?” blurted out Ms Liu, for Tongxin county saw large demonstrations over mosque alterations a while ago.
When Mr Yang arrived he said that “great changes” had reshaped his business, which now focuses on domestic clients. Under Ms Liu’s steady gaze, he added that market forces guided this shift, as his expectations for exports had been too high. Ms Liu broke in. Ningxia is “actually very small”, she said. With a few neighbouring areas, “we can consume all our production locally”.
Bonding over deserts, not mosques
The global market for halal food is estimated to have reached $2.5trn last year. Unsurprisingly, other Ningxia entrepreneurs still dream of exports. Arab countries are an important market and Arabic people are “friends”, said the owner of a halal spice and sauce business encountered at a government-run food festival in Wuzhong. For a couple of years fears of pan-halal tendencies led to stricter controls, he recalled, as one of several plain-clothes agents following Chaguan listened intently. Recently controls have eased a bit, to boost the economy and help local Hui, the business-owner suggested. He nodded at staff manning his stall, noting that they may wear white Muslim skullcaps once more.
Sadly for that entrepreneur, Ningxia has moved on. Wuzhong’s industrial park has lost its halal label, scaled back its ambitions and now focuses on high tech. Official speeches at the food festival praised delicacies from China’s “western regions” but made no mention of halal or Islamic traditions. Ningxia’s government encourages sales of irrigation systems and drought-resistant crops to the Middle East. For a Hui region, it is safe to bond with Arab customers over arid agriculture, but not over shared Muslim faith. In today’s China growth is good, but security comes first. ■
United States | Barking mad
How Kristi Noem missed her shot to be vice-president
A failure to do things by the book
photograph: epa
May 9th 2024
The campaign memoir is an American tradition with a few signature ingredients. These include a flattering headshot, a title superficially stirring but actually meaningless (see Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Hold” or Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to Be Free”) and above all a text that is gently self-congratulatory and so insipid as to be entirely unmemorable. Kristi Noem, the telegenic Republican governor of South Dakota plainly angling to be Donald Trump’s running-mate, has released her own contribution to this grand literary tradition. It succeeds on only two of these three counts: the photo looks expensively posed (with a gilt clock and feminist placard in the foreground and an American flag in background), and the title (“No Going Back”) is suitably vapid. But the contents are unfortunately memorable in the worst possible ways.
Most surreal and disturbing is the story Ms Noem recounts, with some joy, of shooting one of her dogs. Cricket, the ill-fated animal, was a 14-month-old wirehair pointer who ruined a pheasant hunt that Ms Noem had planned for her lodge guests. The rumbustious Cricket then finished her day by attacking some chickens (“she was a trained assassin”) and attempting to bite the hand that fed her (Ms Noem’s). “I hated that dog,” the governor writes. She then decides to put her down by shooting her dead in a gravel pit.
Cricket was not the only casualty that day. On her way home, Ms Noem writes, she spots a billy goat that also needed disposing of. “He was nasty and mean, as most male goats are that are left uncastrated,” she explains. The impulsive deed, partially justified on account of the stench of the goat’s urine, is then performed in the same gravel pit.
On returning home, the governor recounts, her children asked her: “Hey, where’s Cricket?” (Her reply is not given.) This is all meant as a prelude to her penetrating insights about leadership: that it is not easy and sometimes messy. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she writes with some self-awareness, but not enough.
Corpus Kristi
This (along with a fictitious account of meeting with North Korea’s despot, Kim Jong Un, who she says underestimated her fortitude) has junked her chances of being on the Trump ticket. Ms Noem has given various disastrous media interviews defending herself by, among other things, suggesting that Joe Biden ought to euthanise his own dog, which had a penchant for biting Secret Service agents before being sent off to an undisclosed location. The public-relations disaster rather resembles the misadventures of Sarah Palin—the former Alaska governor chosen to be John McCain’s running-mate in 2008—except that Ms Noem will probably never actually enjoy the pomp and perks of a vice-presidential nomination.
Various would-be vice-presidents flew to Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend for a real-life version of “The Bachelor”, in which Mr Trump is the eligible fellow and the prize is a posh four-year stay in Washington with a decent actuarial chance of acquiring the nuclear launch codes. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, was there, as were several senatorial suitors like J.D. Vance of Ohio, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida. Lesser-known lawmakers who are also under consideration, including Elise Stefanik and Byron Donalds, showed up for the auditions as well.
Ms Noem happened to be there, too. No incidents were reported. Any animals in the vicinity must have been safely in their kennels, or on their best behaviour. ■
Europe | Charlemagne
National days offer a study into the inner psyche of Europeans
Happy Europe Day!
illustration: peter schrank
May 9th 2024
Want to get anything done in Europe? Avoid May. The month kicks off with Workers’ Day, which is celebrated by not working. The end of the second world war on the continent (May 8th) warrants another day off in some places. The Christian festivals of Orthodox Easter, Ascension and Pentecost result in yet more long weekends. All this time off can have a paradoxical effect. Reportedly, the French government had planned a big conference this week on promoting the four-day work week—but then realised Wednesday and Thursday were jours fériés, days off which most people supplement with a pont (bridge) on Friday. The confab was postponed. Only in Europe would it be a struggle to get people to attend a meeting on working less.
Another reason to spend time away from the office this past week was Europe Day on May 9th. The occasion is the anniversary of the plan put forward in 1950 to pool the continent’s coal and steel industries which, several million meetings later, gave birth to today’s European Union. Alas, the holiday is not for the public to enjoy, but only for the 60,000-plus employees of the bloc’s institutions, most of them based in Brussels. Perhaps one day, a few million meetings hence, citizens from across a federalised union will mark the holiday together. For now the eu’s 27 members (and a dozen neighbours not in the club) jealously guard “their” national days. The occasions they choose to celebrate—revolution in France, the death of a poet in Portugal, neutrality in Austria—and the manner in which the days are spent offer a glimpse into the psyches of the continent’s citizens.
Many Europeans, like their American cousins on July 4th, commemorate shaking off the imperial yoke. Unlike Americans, some Europeans still share a continent with their former tormentors. Iceland and Norway both cheer evicting the Danes; Cypriots and Maltese observe the ousting of Brits. On October 28th Czechs proclaim the birth of Czechoslovakia in 1918—whereas for Slovaks real independence came when they agreed to an amicable split from the Czechs in 1993. The Balkans are torn between celebrating the dissolution of Yugoslavia three decades ago or their earlier emancipation from the Ottoman empire. From Finland to Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltics, most places that border Russia—and were thus occupied by it at one point—observe their routing of Vladimir Putin’s predecessors. In an odd twist, Spain remembers not the end of imperialism but its outset: its Día de la Hispanidad on October 12th marks the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and thus the start of Spain’s colonial era.
Monarchies such as Sweden and Luxembourg grant a day off to laud crowned heads past and present. The Dutch national day moves to each new monarch’s birthday, though seemingly not if they are born in winter, when outdoor parties would be unpleasant. Liechtenstein celebrates the 20th-century prince who helped turn it from rural backwater to global tax haven. Other countries commemorate the adoptions of their constitutions. For a continent where failure is supposedly a cause of irremediable shame, plenty of not-quite-successful events are lauded. The Baltics memorialise not their escape from Soviet oppression in 1991, but their short-lived break for freedom from Russia in 1918. Hungary has three national holidays, two of which immortalise uprisings (in 1848 and 1956) that were subsequently crushed.
There is plenty of politics in picking what is officially memorialised. Italy’s national day, on June 2nd, honours the establishment of its post-fascist republic in 1946. Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right prime minister whose party remembers fascism more fondly than others, instead prefers to celebrate to the date of Italy’s unification. Belarus used to mark the end of the Soviet era—the exiled democratic opposition still does—but its retrograde dictator now prefers to cheer liberation from the Nazis. In an act of passive-aggressive solidarity, erstwhile West Germany’s national day marked the occasion when East Germans—then a whole different country—had tried in 1953 to resist Soviet aggression. (Germany’s new date, October 3rd, marks its reunification in 1990.) Portugal has eschewed political squabbles by celebrating the death of its foremost poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. Austria revels in its military neutrality by marking the constitution of 1955 that enshrined it.
National days of our lives
Perhaps the most pompous festivities are on France’s July 14th, when a monarchical president oversees celebrations of the revolution of 1789 with a grand military parade—as if to remind aspiring revolutionaries of what they would have to face down to overthrow the nouveau régime. (Ukraine, among others, once organised military processions too, but has suspended them for the time being.) Norway turns over its national day to children’s parades, where schools march under hand-sewn banners. Adults, fittingly for a petro-rich state, start the day with a champagne brunch. Ireland uses its St Patrick’s Day to rekindle its diaspora: ministers are dispatched to countries across the world to quaff a pint of Guinness, while their boss, the taoiseach, spends the day schmoozing America’s president. The Dutch dress in orange from head to toe and suspend normal trading laws, allowing kids to put up stalls and flog their unwanted Christmas gifts.
What of Europe Day? In Brussels the eu opens its doors to the populace whose interests it somewhat distantly serves. At a weekend celebration in the run-up to the day itself, Charlemagne took his family on a tour of the bloc’s institutions. There is much to celebrate in the simmering-down of a continent plagued by centuries of war—one of them still going—to meeting rooms where besuited officials hash out their disagreements. If any fighting could be spotted, it was between national diplomats competing to see who could give out the most sweets to visiting children.
Britain | Rayner of terror
Who is Angela Rayner?
The deputy leader of the Labour Party alarms businesses in Britain. Should she?
illustration: nate kitch
May 6th 2024
Bolshie. gobby. Blunt. Feisty. Mouthy. Scumbag. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has been called a lot of things, not all of which are nice. She has even—and here perhaps a trigger warning is required—been called “ginger”. She can give as good as she gets: she once called some Tories “scum”; she recently described Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, as a “pint-sized loser”.
That Ms Rayner receives such attention is a victory. Most of the Labour shadow cabinet remain just that: shadowy. Ms Rayner, by contrast, stands out: literally (she is tall), visually (she has unarguably red hair) and verbally. Whereas Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, utters phrases like “economic growth is the absolute foundational stone for everything”, Ms Rayner tends to say things like “I had my boob job on my 30th birthday” because “my boobs just looked like two boiled eggs in socks”. She causes conniptions.
If what she says flusters some, what she has not yet said flusters others. Her political future is not assured. The question of how much capital-gains tax she should have paid on the sale of a council house in Stockport looks increasingly serious; a police investigation has begun, and Ms Rayner says she will step down if it finds she has committed an offence. But if she is cleared, her probable next job will be deputy prime minister in a Labour government. And although a great deal is known about her personally, from her first proper job (as a carer) to that boob job (paid for with a £5,600, or $7,030, loan), how she would approach this role is much less clear.
She has said that she will be “John Prescott in a skirt”, a reference to the plain-spoken deputy prime minister to Sir Tony Blair; her remit includes the party’s sweeping plans to bolster workers’ rights. But politically she feels elusive. There are complaints that she has been absent from the “smoked-salmon offensive” at which Labour has buttered up businesses over breakfast (“Is she locked in a cupboard?” asks one ftse 100 boss). Her ideological leanings are hard to pin down.
Ms Rayner is clearly left-wing. But how left? Is she Corbynist or Starmerist? Marxist or—southerners often confuse the two—merely northern? She is “more centre-left, soft-left,” says Peter Mandelson, a Labour grandee. “She’s not hard-left.” Others imply that she lacks an ideology; the word “ambitious” recurs. Michael Ashcroft, a Tory peer and author of a critical unauthorised biography of her, goes further: some colleagues, he says, call her a “political opportunist”. So neither Marxist nor Corbynist, but Angela Raynerist.
She has cause to be happy in her own skin: her life is impressive. She grew up in Stockport, a town in Greater Manchester that Friedrich Engels—sounding rather less united with the workers of the world than usual—called “excessively repellent”. Home offered concrete floors, cold water and an illiterate mother. Other politicians are affluent enough not to know the cost of a pint of milk. Dairy was at times a luxury for Ms Rayner: her mother once gave them “shaving foam…as cream” because she couldn’t read the label. By the time Ms Rayner sat her gcses she was pregnant.
Her childhood was, in short, personally unenviable and politically invaluable. She once said that she has been treated as a “trinket”. Certainly to Labour, Ms Rayner is more than merely “Ange”; she is proof that the party that claims to be “not just of working people but for working people” still is that. She attracts the adjective “real”, as if the middle classes were mere mythology (which Labour, embarrassed by how bourgeois it has become, sometimes seems to wish they were).
Her political rise was rapid: a spell as a trade-union representative led to her becoming an mp in 2015, and a position on the Labour front benches just over a year later. Watch her speak, or read interviews with her, and it is easy to see why. She is charismatic and clever. Where other politicians fudge and waffle she talks about how she ate chips with chips as a child and became “a grandma at 37!” Interviewers often transcribe her speech with exclamation marks! Which can give it an alarming feel! It is a notable change from Sir Keir; he is clearly more a semicolon sort of man.
There are criticisms. She likes to play to a crowd—and British politics has enough crowd-pleasers. Some argue that the grim-up-north-ernness is overdone. Or, as one left-wing commentator put it: “Stuff your back story.” But the criticism has its own critics. Many detect misogyny in the terms, good and bad, that people use about her. Words such as “feisty” (broadly speaking used to mean “a woman who speaks”); “gobby” (a northern woman who does); and “trinket” (an attractive one who ditto) are not unloaded; “ambitious” is a notorious misogynist mantrap.
The more worrying criticism is that she is politically opaque; though to win the next election, it seems that all Labour needs to do is to continue not being the Tories and not saying anything egregious. Ms Rayner once said: “I don’t know when to shut up.” Arguably, it seems, she does. ■
Business | Bartleby
For Gen-Z job-seekers, TikTok is the new LinkedIn
Companies had better start scrolling
illustration: paul blow
May 9th 2024
Young job-seekers are different from their elders. They expect employers to be cuddlier, more forgiving and more generous with perks and pay cheques. The way they go about hunting for work is also distinct. Rather than relying on family and friends, a growing number of Americans are turning to TikTok in search of advice that will help them climb those all-important first steps up the career ladder.
Scrolling through their feeds on the short-video app they might come across a creator called Lauren Spearman. Ms Spearman uploads videos about “red-flag job postings” and “unreasonable job applications”. Or they might find Kennie Bukky, who shares her “salary journey” and hot tips for pay negotiations. If they scroll down further, sooner or later they are likely to happen upon Brittany Peatsch. She went viral after posting a video account of her own experience being laid off from Cloudflare, a software company, and now creates videos offering advice to others suffering through similar ordeals.
Videos like these, with the hashtag CareerTok, have had over 2bn views on the app. Their creators are a diverse bunch: people old enough to be former chief executives, 30-somethings recounting their own early career mistakes, the youngsters themselves. Many of those viewing the clips belong, like your guest columnist, to Generation Z. Given that this cohort, born between 1997 and 2012, will make up 27% of the workforce in the oecd club of mostly rich countries by 2025, social-media career counsel is likely only to grow in prominence.
One thing the success of career-related content on TikTok makes clear as day is that Gen-Zers desire transparency in the workplace. “I love that people are recording their lay-offs because it is exposing the people who are doing terrible lay-offs,” says Chris Williams, formerly in charge of human resources at Microsoft, a software giant, who is now a career adviser—and a content creator himself. Ms Spearman started posting videos on TikTok to document the difficulties she was having job-hunting. “There was a lack of salary transparency, I was set unreasonable tasks, I wasn’t getting any feedback,” she recalls. “In some instances, it was complete ghosting.”
Ms Spearman’s videos are designed primarily to encourage companies to do better. A surprising number respond—probably a reflection of the power of TikTok, but also a sign of workers’ expectations. After she posted a “red flag role” clip about Never Fully Dressed, the clothing firm replied to her and the job listing was updated to reflect her criticism. In the aftermath of Ms Peatsch’s viral lay-off video, Cloudflare’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, tweeted on X that the video was painful to watch. He added that the company was determined not to make similar mistakes in the future. Businesses have hired Ms Spearman to work on marketing campaigns. CareerTok stardom can, it seems, lead to a career beyond social media.
CareerTok gives the creators and viewers a sense of solidarity. More important, its roaring success and billions of views also give them strength in numbers. Ms Bukky, a black woman, hopes that her thoughts and experiences regarding pay negotiations make her viewers more confident in their own professional lives. TikTokers are, she says, forcing employers to ask themselves, “are we paying our employees properly and are we treating them fairly?”
CareerTok videos do not always get the same positive reception. Lay-off clips in particular have faced a backlash from certain quarters. Even if they do not admit to it, many older executives doubtless find them to be an expression of Gen-Z entitlement. On X, Candace Owens, a prominent right-wing commentator, called Ms Peatsch’s Cloudflare video “young and stupid”.
A bigger worry than grumpy managers and hectoring conservatives is potential legal liability. David Harmon, an employment lawyer, cautions creators to “be mindful”. It is all too easy to post something that runs afoul of non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements, securities laws or trade secrets, he says—valuable career advice in itself.
Neither the wrath of old fogeys nor fear of legal consequences is likely to stop venues like CareerTok becoming the site of a workplace struggle between the expectations of Gen-Z workers and their employers. The struggle is not going away, even if TikTok is banned in America. Young professionals will simply find another outlet. ■
Business | Schumpeter
Can Alibaba get the magic back?
China’s e-commerce giant is no longer being stripped for parts. Good
photograph: brett ryder
May 9th 2024
Alibaba used to be synonymous with the success of Chinese e-commerce. Lately the company has been synonymous with its woes. In 2021 it became the grimacing face of an official crackdown against China’s biggest technology firms, whose growing size and seeming social indispensability must have spooked the Communist Party. It was fined a record $2.8bn for monopolistic practices that, the government said, were hurting customers and merchants. Its co-founder, Jack Ma, disappeared into self-imposed exile. Rivals such as pdd, which began life as a group-buying platform, and ByteDance, which owns TikTok and its Chinese sister app, Douyin, proved better at catering to thrifty consumers and at adapting to new trends such as “social commerce”, which mixes shopping and showbusiness.
In late 2022 Alibaba’s market value, which two years earlier had exceeded $800bn, fell below $170bn, close to a record low since its blockbuster initial public offering (ipo) in 2014. To reverse the decline, in March last year the company decided to split itself in six. Five firms were spun out: a logistics business (Cainiao), a cloud-computing one (Aliyun), an international e-commerce operation (which contained Alibaba’s main global platform, AliExpress, and a few regional subsidiaries), a digital-services company (which controls Ele.me, a food-delivery app) and a small media group. Alibaba proper retained the domestic retail operation, which is centred around Taobao and tmall, its two giant marketplaces, and which accounts for nearly 70% of the group’s revenues.
In the past year—and especially since Daniel Zhang was replaced as chief executive in June by Eddie Wu, one of Mr Ma’s co-founders and closest lieutenants—this dismantling strategy has, step by step, been dismantled. First Mr Wu was installed as head of the cloud business, which Mr Zhang took over after the split. Its flotation was called off in November. The following month Mr Wu became head of Taobao. In March he scrapped the ipo of Cainiao, instead purchasing the 36% of it that Alibaba did not already own.
Mr Ma seems to approve. In April he sent a memo to staff, many of whom still revere him. He wrote of rectifying “past mistakes”. He did not say what those were, but many observers took it to mean the troubled break-up plan and struggle to compete with pdd and others. It is easy to dismiss this as Mr Ma’s hubris: no empire-builder likes to see his life’s work undone. Yet staying intact may be the best shot Alibaba has at reviving its fortunes.
The split always looked like a defensive move, designed primarily to placate the party rather than unlock shareholder value. China’s rulers now appear placated, perhaps because a diminished Alibaba no longer looks like a threat or maybe because they have bigger things to worry about, such as a slowing economy. With the target off its back, Alibaba is once again the master of its own fate. That fate is tied to its ability to compete with new e-commerce challengers both at home and abroad. And that ability, in turn, could turn on its logistics and cloud businesses.
Holding on to Cainiao is a bet on the international business. It allows Alibaba to keep parcels flowing smoothly to shoppers anywhere in the world—and, in America and ten other markets, in just five days. This is critical as Mr Wu experiments with a new business model. Alibaba has long been primarily a collection of marketplaces connecting buyers and third-party sellers. A new AliExpress feature, called Choice, involves the firm actually buying products from sellers and shipping them to its foreign buyers.
This is a departure from Alibaba’s original business model. It is reminiscent of Amazon, Shein, a Chinese-born clothing upstart beloved of young Western fashionistas, and to an extent pdd’s thriving American business, Temu (whose sellers agree to strict rules on prices and shipping). It is more capital-intensive—requiring Alibaba to hold its own inventory—but enables better quality control of products shipped to consumers. This is important in rich-world markets, where shoppers expect nothing less, but also in China, where consumers are becoming more discerning. It appears to be working. Choice was behind the 44% year-on-year jump in international revenues in the final three months of 2023.
Whereas keeping Cainiao should help Alibaba compete with Temu and Shein abroad, reintegrating Aliyun is meant to provide a way of countering ByteDance and others at home. The value of goods sold on Douyin and Kuaishou, a rival video app popular in China, is ballooning. TikTok is experimenting with social commerce in foreign markets. Alibaba has no meaningful social-media business, and no plans to create one. Instead, it is trying to retain shoppers by enhancing its customer experience with the help of artificial intelligence. It says more users are trying Wenwen, Taobao’s own Chatgpt-ish ai function, which guides users through purchasing decisions.
Gross merchandise valour
Alibaba has a fight on its hands. Temu and Shein have outspent it on logistics and marketing abroad, especially in America. A big push there could rack up losses and upset jittery investors. In China, the online economy is slowing. s&p Global, a rating agency, expects digital transactions to grow by 8-9% annually over the next two years—faster than gdp but sluggish compared with the average of 13% over the past five years. In the last quarter of 2023 Douyin and pdd’s Pinduoduo platform accounted for 90% of additional sales, reckons Bernstein, a broker. Alibaba lost ground. Chatty ai may not be enough to stop shoppers seeking thriftier options or a bit of social-commerce fun to brighten their days.
Mr Wu may outline his next moves when Alibaba presents its full-year results on May 14th. He may be right that the company is worth more whole than as a collection of separate parts. How much more will depend on factors beyond his control. ■
Finance and economics | Buttonwood
Banks, at least, are making money from a turbulent world
It is once again a good time to work on a trading desk
illustration: satoshi kambayashi
May 9th 2024
Working on a trading desk is perhaps the closest an office job can get to a sport. Focus and reflexes matter. On the other side of every trill of the phone or ding from a computer is a client who wants to trade. If ignored, they will hang up and call a competitor. Everyone is sweating, owing to the heat wafting up from stacks of computers whirring at capacity. On a busy day, it is impossible to leave the desk—making the job a feat of endurance. Just as sports teams use code to communicate their tactics, so do traders: “cable, a yard, mine, Geneva,” translates to “Brevan Howard, a hedge fund, is buying £1bn and selling dollars.” Mistakes cause swearing, shouting and sometimes the smashing of equipment.
Or at least that is how it was a couple of decades ago, in the good old days. Following the global financial crisis of 2007-09, life sapped from the trading floor. Stringent new rules curbed profits. High-frequency traders ate banks’ lunches, especially in stockmarkets. For its part, the global economy was in a stupor, having been tranquillised by low interest rates. Markets moved linearly, with equities drifting up and bond yields slipping down. There were fireworks—the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump—but they were rare. This placid world provided investors with little reason to trade in and out of positions. Revenues were slim; returns sagged. Drama on trading floors featured lay-offs, rather than market moves.
At long last, however, the good old days appear to have returned. Revenues from trading desks at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, three giant banks, leapt by around 40% between 2019 and 2020—and have remained at or above that level since. For much of the 2010s global markets businesses barely returned their cost of capital. Now they post double-digit returns on equity. At Goldman, traders churned out a whopping 18% return on average common equity in the first quarter of 2024. At Morgan Stanley they posted 15%.
Until recently, bankers hemmed and hawed about this bonanza. Was it too good to be true? Mediocre returns had endured for such a long time that they had grown cautious about extrapolating from a good quarter, or even a good year. Of course, 2020, a banner year, was an aberration, the logic went—there was hardly going to be another pandemic. Then 2021 was just as good. On earnings calls in early 2022 bank bosses were cautious. “None of us could have anticipated the environment that we have lived through over the last two years,” said David Solomon of Goldman. “We in no way see that as a permanent environment that is going to continue at this pace.” Jeremy Barnum of JPMorgan talked of “normalisation”, followed by “modest growth”. But the chaos of 2022 was just as good for trading and markets did not slow down in 2023. Stocks roared and bond yields collapsed in the final two months of the year. Given that expectations about central-bank policies are still swinging wildly, this year ought to end as another good one.
So did 2020 represent a structural change in the markets business of banks, rather than a blip? There is reason to think so. Among bankers, cautious optimism has replaced talk of normalisation. Asked if robust activity is the “new normal” for banks, Andy Morton, head of markets at Citigroup, responds that “it is hard to say, honestly, but there are some reasons to expect things will remain reasonably volatile”. That rates have climbed sharply, after the stasis of the previous decade, has been “a recipe for volatility”, he says. He also highlights rising geopolitical tensions and the growth of new industries, such as private credit, as reasons for elevated activity. Trends such as ageing populations and the climate transition might continue to stoke inflation, meaning continued interest-rate volatility. And all kinds of markets have ricocheted in recent years: not just bond and equity markets but also those for currencies and commodities, including European gas.
This leads to a striking conclusion. Perhaps ultra-loose monetary policy was more troublesome for banks than post-financial-crisis regulation. As is now clear, it is perfectly possible to make lots of money intermediating markets without committing the sins of the pre-2008 era—not least taking positions—so long as markets are sufficiently volatile. This kind of financial dynamism might not be welcome news to everyone. But it has undoubtedly made the job of trading markets as lucrative, and physically laborious, as in an earlier golden age. ■
Finance and economics | Free exchange
Could America and its allies club together to weaken the dollar?
China would not be happy
illustration: álvaro bernis
May 9th 2024
The plaza hotel has New York glamour in spades. Sitting at a corner of Central Park, it was the setting for “Home Alone 2”, a film that came out in 1992 in which a child finds himself lost in the metropolis. He takes up residence in one of the hotel’s suites, thanks to his father’s credit card, and briefly lives a life of luxury. Donald Trump, the hotel’s owner at the time, has a walk-on part, which was the outcome of a hard bargain. According to the film’s director, he demanded to appear as a condition for giving the filmmakers access to the hotel. This was not the first deal in which the venue had played a part. Seven years earlier it hosted negotiators for the Plaza Accord, which was agreed on by America, Britain, France, Japan and West Germany, and aimed for a depreciation of the dollar against the yen and the Deutschmark.
Echoes of the period can be heard today. In the mid-1980s America was booming. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts had led to a wide fiscal deficit and the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates to bring inflation to heel. As a consequence, the dollar soared. American policymakers worried about a loss of competitiveness to an up-and-coming Asian economy (Japan then, China today). The Plaza Accord was designed to address what officials saw as the persistent mispricing of the dollar. Robert Lighthizer, Mr Trump’s trade adviser, has mulled a repeat. The accord set a precedent for “significant negotiation between America’s allies to address unfair global practices”, he wrote in “No Trade is Free”, a book published last year. Mr Trump’s team is reportedly considering options to devalue the dollar if the former president returns to office.
Many of America’s allies would support an attempt to hammer the greenback. Asian officials worry about a strong dollar raising the cost of imported commodities, many of which are priced in the currency, as well as the expense for exporters who finance trade in it. In April Japan and South Korea released a statement along with the American Treasury, acknowledging “serious concerns....about the recent sharp depreciation of the Japanese yen and the Korean won”. More recently, Japan has seemingly spent tens of billions of dollars boosting its currency.
Could the Plaza Accord be a blueprint for a new era of collaboration? Economists are wary of currency intervention. In the presence of monetary policy that targets inflation, the textbook model says it should have little impact on the exchange rate. Differences in interest rates, perceptions of risk, and anticipated inflation and growth are what should drive capital flows between countries. A central bank that wants to stand in the way of the market must subordinate its inflation goal to defending the currency, lest it burn through its foreign-exchange reserves.
The Plaza Accord, though, represented a best case for intervention, as it was co-ordinated between several central banks and pushed markets in a direction in which they were already heading. The dollar had peaked in February 1985—more than half a year before the meeting at the Plaza Hotel. Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard University attributes its turnaround to the appointment of James Baker as treasury secretary that month. He mentioned the problem of the strong currency at his appointment hearing. The agreement at the Plaza Hotel was the capstone to fiscal- and monetary-policy changes already under way, providing a confirmation for currency traders that officials had shifted their focus. Today, by contrast, policy looks fixed. Persistent inflation has led the Federal Reserve to push back interest-rate cuts. Although shrinking America’s fiscal deficit would help address both inflation and the strong dollar, neither presidential candidate shows much keenness for the rectitude that would be required.
Perhaps Mr Trump could employ the tactic he used when securing a cameo in “Home Alone 2”: swapping access for a favour. Indeed, Mr Lighthizer has advocated something along these lines, suggesting that America could threaten to shut competitors out of its domestic market, much as it did when securing the Plaza Accord. Back then a growing trade deficit with Japan prompted a resurgence of American protectionism among the country’s politicians. One congressman remarked that “the Smoot-Hawley tariff itself would have passed overwhelmingly had it come to the floor”, referring to an infamous Depression-era tariff increase that set off a wave of retribution around the world. Bringing about a stronger yen through co-operation was seen as an alternative to tariffs on Japan: both would weaken the country’s exporters while supposedly strengthening America’s.
The art of the deal
It is hard to imagine a similar agreement with China today. America sees the country not just as an economic competitor, as it did Japan, but as a geopolitical threat. Tariffs are already high and a range of Chinese goods, from electric vehicles to social-media apps, face restrictions in American markets, often on the grounds of national security rather than economic protectionism.
Suppose, however, that America got its budget under control, reducing inflationary pressure as well as the need for counterbalancing inflows of foreign capital. Then it might be able to work with Asian allies, and persuade European ones, to strengthen their currencies against the dollar. Such a united front could put China in a difficult situation. Previously the country has responded to tariffs by devaluing the yuan. Research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggests that the Chinese government weakened the yuan by 0.7% for every increase in implied tariff revenue for America of $10bn during the 2018-19 trade war. If the dollar was already falling, the Chinese government would have to choose between accepting the effects of the tariffs or starting a currency war that it might lose. Giving his rival such a dilemma would be an even better outcome for Mr Trump than a big-screen cameo. ■
Culture | Death and a thousand nuts
What strategies actually work to fight dying?
A prominent biologist tackles a morbid topic
Long in the tooth, but ageing wellphotograph: science photo library
May 9th 2024
Why We Die. By Venki Ramakrishnan. William Morrow; 320 pages; $32.50. Hodder Press; £25
For most of human history, death has been a blunt fact of life. People died because they were eaten, had an accident or developed an infection. In 1950 global life expectancy was 46.5 years. But now that the world is richer and healthier, it is almost 72. Living longer exposes more people to the wear and tear of ageing. Unlike their ancestors, they spend little time dodging predators and worry instead about succumbing to dementia or simply to frailty.
In “Why We Die”, Dr Venki Ramakrishnan asks whether it is possible to arrest the decay of body and mind. A molecular biologist based in Britain, Dr Ramakrishnan won a Nobel prize in 2009 for his work on how cells generate the proteins that make up human bodies. As those cells accumulate chemical damage, for instance from toxins, they malfunction, and their inherent repair mechanisms deteriorate.
Though technical terms pepper his account, he has a jauntily accessible style. He likens a breakdown in vital proteins to an orchestra playing discordantly. When discussing how the energy-generating mitochondria in cells degrade over time, he pictures them “rusting from within”.
Is this decline inevitable? Dr Ramakrishnan notes that some species, such as jellyfish, respond to injury or stress by rejuvenating themselves. Among mammals, the naked mole rat stands out, seemingly resistant to heart disease and cancer. Can humans learn the secrets of longevity from the mole rat—or from the hydra, a tiny aquatic creature capable of indefinite self-renewal? Scientists are trying.
The quest to cheat death has a long history. More than 2,000 years ago Qin Shi Huang, a Chinese emperor, directed a team of envoys to seek the elixir of life. He died at 49, apparently killed by the very potions he dreamed would preserve him.
Only in the past 50 years have biologists fully grasped the processes that cause ageing. Scientists harness ever more sophisticated tools to manipulate cells and genes, and a new industry has sprung up. Some 700 biotech firms currently focus on ageing and longevity. Though they have achieved few advances, hype runs riot.
Dr Ramakrishnan takes a hard look at voguish therapies. Not all of them draw criticism. He cites evidence for the benefits of limiting calorie intake, and cautiously reports the promise of rapamycin, a drug that produces the same effects without the need to restrict diet. But there are many “dubious” enterprises pushing “crackpot” ideas. He is especially critical of cryonics, a process that involves freezing people after death and defrosting them when cures for their ailments are found.
Also in the firing line are messianic figures who tout fantasies of eternal life. One, Aubrey de Grey, asserts that the first humans to live to 1,000 have already been born; he promotes what he calls “longevity escape velocity”, the idea that human beings can improve average life expectancy faster than they age and thus never die.
Prophets of immortality attract funding from plutocrats who treat life as yet another system that can be hacked. Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur, has spent an estimated $2m a year on his anti-ageing regimen, which until recently included blood transfusions from his teenage son (he has said these produced “no benefits”). Those who share his interest in anti-ageing research include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg: “When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they’re rich, they want to be young,” writes Dr Ramakrishnan.
A wide gap in life expectancy still exists between rich and poor. The new science and business of longevity threaten to increase it. Dr Ramakrishnan is uncomfortable about this. By 2050 there will be 2bn people who are over 60, reckons the World Health Organisation. He predicts mounting problems: overpopulation, dwindling natural resources and fewer workers to support a growing cohort of pensioners.
In the end he offers conservative advice. If you aspire to a long, healthy life, you should sleep well, exercise and eat moderately, consuming mainly plants. For those who favour bolder interventions, he has a simple message: “Even if we conquer ageing, we will die of…wars, viral pandemics or environmental catastrophes.”
Boosting your lifespan may beguile the imagination but could rob your existence of meaning, because there is no urgency to make every day count. Perhaps, after all, life’s transience is the key to its beauty. ■
The Economist explains | The Economist explains
Could the International Criminal Court indict Binyamin Netanyahu?
Rumours abound that an arrest warrant is imminent for Israel’s prime minister
photograph: ap
May 7th 2024
Israel’s government is concerned that the International Criminal Court (icc) in The Hague will issue arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials in relation to the war in Gaza. Those under suspicion could include Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, members of his cabinet and generals in the Israel Defence Forces. The icc has not said it is considering such a move. Yet Mr Netanyahu felt the threat serious enough to state on April 30th that any warrant “would be an outrage of historic proportions”. The icc’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, warned that threats to “retaliate” against the court could undermine its impartiality. On what grounds would the icc issue such warrants, and what would be the consequences?
Several accusations of war crimes have been made against Israel during the war. The International Court of Justice, for instance, which is not connected to the icc, has conducted inconclusive hearings on whether Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Unlike that court, the icc deals with individuals rather than countries.
Read all our coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas
The list of those it has charged in its two-decade history is a 54-name-long litany of infamy. It includes Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan tyrant for whom an arrest warrant was issued on charges of crimes against humanity five months before his death in November 2011; Omar al-Bashir, a former dictator of Sudan, indicted in 2009, but still “at large”, as the icc website puts it; and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for whom the icc issued an arrest warrant in March 2023, for the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine.
It is not a list that Mr Netanyahu would want to join, even—or perhaps especially—if the icc also indicts senior Hamas leaders, as seems likely. The perception of moral equivalence with Israel’s foes would be hard for him to stomach.
As for the alleged crimes, Israeli legal officials suspect the icc is investigating the obstruction of humanitarian supplies into Gaza, which international aid organisations claim has brought parts of the enclave to famine. The icc could be considering an indictment on intentional starvation, a war crime. It might be partly based on the statements of some Israeli ministers, which suggested that Israel should impose a siege on Gaza and block all supplies to it in the wake of the October 7th attack.
Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which gives the icc its powers. The country would be unlikely to hand over its officials to stand trial. Still, the arrest warrants would “make Israel an international pariah”, says one Israeli official. It would also make it very difficult for the individuals named to engage with their foreign counterparts. They would be liable for arrest when travelling abroad to the 124 countries that recognise the icc’s jurisdiction. Even America, which is not a signatory, would be reluctant to host them.
Simply the threat of indictment can be powerful. Israeli officials privately link recent attempts to increase aid deliveries to Gaza to the fear of icc warrants. That is also one reason Israel delayed for weeks the next phase of its ground attacks against the remaining Hamas stronghold in the city of Rafah. Still, on May 7th Israeli forces said they had taken control of the Rafah border crossing, a crucial route for aid into Gaza, as they continue the offensive.
Some of Israel’s supporters argue that an international court’s intervention is unwarranted because the country has its own independent judiciary to hold the government to account. A petition from five human-rights organisations is currently being heard in Israel’s high court, demanding that the government do more to allow supplies into Gaza. On May 3rd petitioners argued that the government was not fulfilling the aid commitments that it made in a previous hearing. If the government cannot abide by what it says in an Israeli court, its leaders may find themselves soon having to answer an international one.■
Obituary | For the love of giraffes
Anne Innis Dagg devoted her life to the world’s tallest creature
The zoologist and campaigner for equality died on April 1st, aged 91
photograph: alison reid
May 8th 2024
When the bizarre creature first appeared in Florence, in 1487 at the court of the Medici, it caused a sensation. Bending down its long, long neck, it took food from children, and was fed with fruit by noblewomen from second-storey windows. In 1827, in Paris, a female giraffe presented to Charles X stirred an outbreak of giraffe-mania, with high-piled hairstyles, giraffe-spotted wallpaper and years on, some say, the design of the Eiffel Tower.
What happened to Anne Innis Dagg, when she was two and visiting the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, was just as momentous in its way. Being very small, and the giraffes very tall, she was naturally amazed. But when something suddenly frightened them, and they galloped with a flurry of necks and legs across their enclosure, that was beautiful.
From then on, their lives were hers. Her toys were giraffes, her drawings were of giraffes, and she resolved to know everything about them. But information was scarce, and not only in her native Toronto. It seemed she would have to write the necessary books herself. At university she read biology, then taught zoology, to get as close as she could. And her devotion never wavered. When she went back to the Brookfield Zoo, as a young woman, the stare of a lordly male with huge brown eyes reduced her to reverence. In her 80s, when a male called Buddy bowed low to slobber gently on her shirt, she embraced him.
Zoos were not good enough, of course. Why study a set of giraffe incisors, rather than watch how they were used to strip leaves from thorn trees in the wild? Why pore over a leg bone, rather than follow the way live legs leapt through a thicket? Their movements, so graceful with such bulk to shift, intrigued her particularly. Out in the lowveld of southern Africa she could watch whole crowds in motion, like a ballet.
So she must go. Even Ian Dagg, the man she planned to marry, would have to wait until she had kept long company with wild giraffes. But in the 1950s young women did not do solo field work. It was improper, or the snakes were too dangerous, or some nonsense. Thirteen African governments turned her down, and the kind farmer who eventually welcomed her, Alexander Matthew, did so only after she had written masquerading as a man. When she reached his ranch in eastern Transvaal, having walked the last few miles through the bush after her Ford Prefect had broken down, he realised he had a serious researcher on his hands.
As for her, she was in heaven. The first wild giraffe she saw exceeded expectations, half-kneeling to drink for seconds from a water hole before swinging up her head and rising, magnificent. Day after happy day she was up at 5am to drive out and observe for ten hours from her car. Any closer, and the giraffes would have cantered away; but Mr Matthew had lent her his field glasses and his 16mm cine camera. As for snakes, and biting ants, and drunken men trying it on, she could well look out for herself.
As before, it was the gait of giraffes that transfixed her. They ran so smoothly, she discovered, because the two left or right legs moved in unison, to prevent the hind leg hitting the front one. More exciting still, their necks moved in close correlation with their legs, giving that wonderful flow-effect. But everything was done with delicate adaptability to the arid land they lived in.
Some aspects of their lives surprised her. They did not form a close-knit herd. They had no leader and (save females with their young) no nuclear families, but were a loose set of individuals who communicated sparingly. Her African hosts thought them stupid, but they were clever enough to jump fences, rather than break through, and to drink from cattle troughs, which was easier.
The most curious thing was how the males behaved. They sparred so much that their skulls had extra deposits of bone. Yet it would usually end lovingly, often with attempts to mate. Homosexual behaviour in animals became another study, but she still felt too embarrassed to tell her host about it. She might drive hundreds of miles alone and wear men’s slacks, but to most people she met she was a “girl”, even in her 20s, innocent of such things.
She was presumed innocent, or uncaring, about apartheid too. She tried to befriend the black ranch workers, only to be told by the whites not to bother: they were illiterate, thieving and clumsy. Her angry ripostes were met with laughter at how naive she was.
She left Africa, after a year, with two burning ambitions: to write up, and teach, everything she had learned about giraffes, and to fight inequality when she found it. Where she now found it, infuriatingly, was in her own life. Marriage was fine in itself, once she had paid for the ring to dispel any notion that Ian had “bought” her. It became a problem because wives and mothers were meant to be only that. The papers she had produced, while cooking and pushing prams, counted for nothing. Academia was now not her place. All the Canadian universities where she sought tenure, Guelph, Wilfrid Laurier and Waterloo, rejected her for less qualified men. Like the Romans, who were bothered that the giraffe Caesar brought home was two things, not one—hence camelopardis, camel-leopard—they viewed her as a freak.
The first full-length scientific study of her favourite creature, “The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behaviour, and Ecology” (1976) was therefore written when she was unemployed. Many other studies and papers followed. She found lesser university posts, but without tenure she remained, she felt, a non-person. It took a zookeepers’ conference in 2010 and a film, “The Woman who Loves Giraffes” (2018) to restore her to general notice. Guelph apologised, which was nice, but she mourned the wasted years.
Making the film took her back to Africa. There she watched her beloved giraffes running free again. No, they didn’t stick together like a herd. Not, at least, in the way dominant male humans did, at the top of universities in the bad old days. ■
Business | Back to work
Is America Inc’s war for talent over?
Competition has cooled—for now
photograph: getty images
May 8th 2024
Two years ago companies in America were scrambling to plug vacancies from shop floors and call centres to corporate headquarters. Workers laid off during the pandemic proved difficult to lure back, particularly those who had opted for early retirement. Others who spent their lockdowns dreaming of new beginnings resigned en masse once business resumed as normal. The share of American workers quitting their jobs each month went from 2.3% before the pandemic to a record 3% at the start of 2022. By March of that year there were two job openings for every unemployed worker in America.
chart: the economist
That frenzy has now passed. As economic growth has moderated, employers have reined in hiring. On May 3rd the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that America added 175,000 jobs in April, well below expectations. Companies including Nike, a sportswear brand, and Tesla, a maker of electric vehicles, have announced lay-offs in recent weeks. The ratio of job openings to unemployed workers has dwindled to 1.3. With quit rates down to 2.1%, the “great resignation” appears to have fizzled out (see chart).
Workers sense that their power is waning. The number of active strikes in America fell from a post-pandemic high of 76 in September to 40 in March, according to a tracker compiled by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Illinois. The share of work that employees do at home has hovered between 25% and 30% since the start of last year, less than people say they would like. Companies, meanwhile, are cracking down on unruliness. Google, a technology giant, sacked around 50 pro-Palestinian employees last month for protesting over a cloud-computing deal with Israel’s government.
For bosses, though, the war for talent is not entirely over. Fully 70% of American companies surveyed earlier this year by ManpowerGroup, a staffing firm, said they were having difficulty filling roles. That is down from 75% last year, but up from 40% a decade ago. Johnny Taylor junior, head of the Society for Human Resource Management, a business association, says that the job market has shaken off the “unsustainable craziness” of recent years, but is expected to remain tight.
One reason is demography. The World Bank forecasts that over the course of the 2020s the share of America’s population aged between 20 and 64 will fall from 59% to 56%. A second reason is the growing mismatch between the skills employees have and the ones employers need as the economy continues to digitise. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has heightened that concern, says Anu Madgavkar of McKinsey, a consultancy.
Despite all their talk of retraining workers for the digital age, companies are dragging their feet. Average budgets for such purposes among American firms with over 10,000 employees fell from $19m in 2022 to $16m last year, according to Training, a trade publication. Such costs are often among the first to be trimmed when business slows. Once it picks up again, bosses may rue their skimpiness. ■
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