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Leaders | Revolt of the reasonable
The pro-choice movement that could help Joe Biden win
A backlash against abortion bans is energising the middle ground in America
About ten thousand women eligible to vote in this November’s elections were born before women won the right to vote. In the century since then, American women have steadily accumulated rights. In the 1960s the contraceptive pill let women choose how many children they had. In the 1970s no-fault divorce laws and Roe v Wade gave women more choices that had been denied to their mothers. This progress seemed irreversible, and was often taken for granted. Then, two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe, throwing the question of allowing or disallowing abortion back to the states. It turns out that rights can be taken away, too.
A third of American women aged 15-49 now live in states where abortion is either illegal or impossibly restricted. Some states have passed statutes so severe and vaguely drafted that doctors fear they may be forced to choose between risking a patient’s life—in the case of a dangerous miscarriage or complicated pregnancy—and risking breaking the law.
Yet gloomy as this reversal seems, it has also given rise to America’s most dynamic new political movement: a revolt of millions of Americans who think government has little business inserting itself into private decisions. For many women that movement will restore or fortify the freedom to choose. It could also, perhaps, sway the presidential election.
Dobbs, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe, has been an own goal for the anti-abortion movement. Surprisingly, the number of abortions has risen slightly since it was announced. Though some states promptly banned the procedure, others made it easier to obtain. Also, the federal drug regulator has allowed abortifacient pills to be prescribed by mail, giving millions of women (including some in anti-abortion states) easier access to early-term abortions than they had before. However, for millions of other women, getting a legal termination has become much harder. The result of the court’s decision, then, has been to assign people more or less choice depending on where they live.
Outrage has given rise to a grassroots political movement. It involves more Americans than any such uprising since Black Lives Matter in 2020 or the Tea Party more than a decade ago. However, it is better organised and has clearer goals. Its foot soldiers carry clipboards. Tens of thousands of volunteers have gathered millions of signatures to put abortion rules to state referendums. The movement has already had success in some surprising places, such as Ohio and Kansas. As many as 16 states could hold abortion referendums on the same day Americans will pick their next president.
Only 24 of the 50 states allow citizen-led ballot initiatives, so the patchwork of state campaigns is a poor substitute for a federal law. But by the end of 2024, if all the initiatives make it onto a ballot, most American women of reproductive age will have had a chance to vote on abortion since Dobbs. Florida is crucial. It is the third-most populous state and, until a strict ban came into force in May, it was a place to which many women came from other states to seek terminations, since the procedure is illegal and sure to remain so in much of the South.
If the pro-choice movement’s only effect was on American women’s health, it would be worth taking seriously. If it also helps President Joe Biden win re-election, it will have global consequences. Could the backlash against Dobbs keep the man whose judicial appointments made it possible, Donald Trump, out of the White House?
Maybe. Few voters are enthusiastic about Mr Biden. A mass movement in support of a goal his party shares ought to boost the turnout of Democrats. Abortion referendums in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states, could spur marginal centrist and left-leaning voters to make their way to a polling station. Many Americans believe the economy is weaker than it is and also blame the president for high prices, so giving them an alternative reason to show up to vote is helpful. In a tight race, even a modest boost could be decisive, and abortion seems likely to help the Biden campaign more than it harms it.
Yet the odds are still that it won’t be enough. If pro-choice referendums pass, it will often be because pro-choice Republicans, a group whose opinions get squashed in their own party, showed up to back them. Most will vote for legal abortion—and for Mr Trump. Polls say that Mr Biden is losing in the swing states. That suggests voters can separate their views on abortion from their party preference. If overall turnout is high, abortion will matter less, because the enthusiasm of pro-choice voters will be drowned out. If turnout is low they will count for more, benefiting Mr Biden.
For most of the world, the election is what matters: billions are bracing for another four years of Trumpian fireworks. But for Americans, it should be heartening that the pro-choice movement is tackling a central failure of American politics. On many issues, especially those related to the culture wars, American attitudes are little different from those in other rich democracies, but federal lawmakers do a lousy job of reflecting them. Most Americans want abortion to be legal early in a pregnancy but illegal later on. Yet extremist minorities in Congress block compromise of this sort. So even if Democrats were to win the presidency and both chambers of Congress in November (which is unlikely), they would still be unable to pass a national abortion law that aligns with public opinion. This dynamic also explains why it took until two years ago to pass a federal gay-marriage law, a decade after Britain and France had done so, and also why states are going their own way on marijuana legalisation while Congress dithers.
Sign here
Thus, this new movement shows a different side of American politics. It is not made up of keyboard warriors vying for attention online, but of people giving up their weekends and evenings to try to persuade their neighbours of an idea they hold deeply. It is participatory and local, the kind of thing that de Tocqueville raved about after visiting the country back in 1831. It is how democracy in America is supposed to work.
Leaders | Eastern promise
Japan and South Korea are getting friendlier. At last
As the world economy fragments, two export powerhouses see the virtue of chumminess
photograph: getty images
May 30th 2024
Not long ago, relations between Japan and South Korea were dismal. Between 2018 and 2021 they bickered over compensation for Japan’s abuse of Koreans as forced labourers during the second world war. Tit-for-tat trade curbs and boycotts of goods followed; intelligence-sharing was put at risk.
Fast forward three years, and things are much friendlier. On May 27th Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president, and Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, met Li Qiang, China’s premier, for the first trilateral summit in four years. The two leaders held a similar gabfest with America’s president, Joe Biden, last year, and are due to do so again in July. It helps that Mr Yoon and Mr Kishida get along far better than their predecessors did. But the newfound amity goes beyond personalities. It reflects a growing realisation that, at a time when America and China are turning inward, the two export powerhouses have many interests—and challenges—in common.
Like other countries, Japan and South Korea are figuring out how to navigate the ever-stormier relationship between America and China. Uncle Sam provides them with security, in the face of Chinese and North Korean threats. Yet China is their biggest trading partner. Both countries have a lot to lose should the superpowers turn their backs on global commerce. Their home markets are relatively small and, given their ageing populations, sluggish. Exports amount to 22% of Japan’s gdp and 48% of South Korea’s, well above the 12% for America. Less than a quarter of the sales of Samsung and Toyota, the most valuable South Korean and Japanese companies, respectively, are domestic.
Both countries are therefore firm advocates of global trade. And their heft in manufacturing supply chains means that together they can temper the worst instincts of the superpowers. Because America’s industrial policy relies on luring East Asian chipmakers, battery manufacturers and electric-vehicle firms to its shores, their lobbying could help limit the more protectionist elements of American trade policy. Although recipients of handouts from America’s Inflation Reduction Act are barred from using Chinese graphite, South Korean battery-makers recently wangled a two-year reprieve.
Japan and South Korea will also push back where their economic interests do not align with America’s. Both have concerns about a more belligerent Beijing, but are keener than America to stay open for business. The White House would like them to implement stricter restrictions on exports to China of chips and the parts to make them. But neither is keen to hamstring its exporters in a huge market. And since Mr Biden came out against Nippon Steel acquiring us Steel, Japanese and Korean executives have become more fearful that American protectionism will turn against them, too.
Perhaps as a consequence, Japan and South Korea are doing more business with each other (and links with Taiwan, another big manufacturer, are strengthening too). They have agreed jointly to build a supply chain for hydrogen; firms including Samsung are setting up facilities in Japan. Tae-won Chey, the chairman of sk Group, South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate, has even proposed a European-style single market between the two countries—a praiseworthy, if distant, ambition.
The newfound friendship is fragile. A dispute is brewing over cross-border investment, with Japan pressing a South Korean tech firm to divest from a local venture owing to cyber-security concerns. Mr Yoon and Mr Kishida will not be in office for ever; relations could sour again. That would be unfortunate. The second world war ended nearly 80 years ago. Japan and South Korea are now fellow democracies in a dangerous neighbourhood. Their governments need to stop quarrelling about the past and work together in the present. Warmer ties would be good for them both, and for the world. ■
Briefing | Abortion and politics
The undoing of Roe v Wade has created a mighty political movement
The power of women with clipboards
photograph: jamie kelter davis/new york times/redux/eyevine
May 30th 2024|orlando and phoenix
Hikers climbing out of their cars early in the morning at North Mountain Park in Phoenix, Arizona, are welcomed by songbirds and two women behind a fold-up table. “Would you like to protect a woman’s right to choose?” asks Beth Ballmann, from beneath a bright pink sun hat. A barely awake young man mumbles something about not being registered. Linda Chiles’s eyes light up. “I can help you with that too. We can do it today!”
Along with many others, the two women are trying to collect enough signatures to add a referendum to Arizona ballots in November, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. The volunteers wear “We Can Do It” Rosie the Riveter t-shirts bought on Amazon. They have carried their clipboards to car parks, yoga classes, the state fair and many doorsteps. “They can’t escape us this time,” Ms Chiles whispers, as a couple returns from a hike. Indeed they don’t.
In its ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation in June 2022, America’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which had established a federal right to abortion for the previous half century. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority. Two things have happened—one more expected than the other.
Republican-controlled state legislatures moved quickly to restrict abortion by passing laws of greater or lesser extremity (Texas bans even women who have been raped from obtaining them). These bans have not led to a reduction in the number of abortions nationally. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, estimates that the number rose by over a tenth between 2020 and 2023, to above 1m, partly because it has become easier to obtain abortion pills by post. The bans have forced more women to travel long distances, however. They have also led to appalling scenes in hospitals, as doctors fearful of breaking the new laws refuse to treat women who miscarry.
The second effect of the Dobbs judgment was that people infuriated by the decision have channelled their anger into political action. The decision and its consequences have released a vast amount of energy, which is most evident in the ballot campaigns in Arizona and other states. This friendliest and fiercest of citizen rebellions is the most important bottom-up force in American politics since the Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009. It could not only expand abortion access for tens of millions of women, but sway local and national elections. It could even determine whether Americans elect Donald Trump or Joe Biden as their next president.
chart: the economist
Since the Dobbs decision, six states have held referendums on abortion—some seeking greater protections for women, others greater restrictions. Some were initiated by citizens, others by legislatures. In all six, the abortion-rights side prevailed. In November, referendums could be held in as many as 16 more states (see map). Campaigners already have enough signatures in some, including Florida. That state is crucial because it was the abortion destination for many women in the South until May 1st, when it outlawed most abortions after six weeks. If the initiative passes, abortion will be legalised up to the point of viability, roughly 24 weeks. Democrats hope the issue has put Florida in play in the presidential election.
On Lake Eola in downtown Orlando, tourists in pedalos look perplexed as protesters wave giant models of the female reproductive system, made of pool noodles. Signs declare that “not supporting women’s rights is small-dick energy”; t-shirts label supporters “abortion-rights barbies”. Deanna Fellows travelled 140 miles (225km) to the event by bus. She was one of 10,000 volunteers who helped gather over 1m signatures to ensure that Floridians will vote on abortion in November. She is 77, and it is her first protest.
The clipboard-wielding army
Women, many of them old enough to remember the days before 1973, when Roe was decided, are the motors of the new abortion-rights ballot movement. Ms Ballmann retired a few weeks before the Dobbs decision. She had never been politically active, but found a new calling after feeling “pure outrage”. An organiser in Florida, Anna Hochkammer, says that “annoyed housewives” printed petitions and took them to their local farmers’ markets. Experienced campaigners tend to turn up once local groups are up and running.
Campaign tactics vary from state to state. “What freedom means to an Ohioan versus a Floridian may be subtly different,” says Ms Hochkammer. In 2022 campaigners in firmly conservative Kansas alluded to pandemic-era mask and vaccine rules and encouraged voters to “say no to more government control”. The 2023 Ohio campaign was gentler and less individualistic. Adverts fronted by a reverend said that “abortion is a private, family decision.” Gabriel Mann from Pro-Choice Ohio, which led the campaign, said it did not focus on removing the stigma from abortion, but rather not letting “the government take this decision away”.
Grisly props like coat hangers, once ubiquitous at pro-choice rallies, are out of favour. Volunteers bring dry humour instead. A baseball cap states: “I chose this hat.” A t-shirt reads: “Mind your own uterus”. Also in are “women”. In Michigan, studiously non-gendered language (such as protecting “an individual’s ability to have an abortion”) fell flat in focus groups, says Bonsitu Kitaba of the American Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group. “Freedom” is the uniting theme, appealing to libertarians, lefty feminists and others.
America’s anti-abortion movement began as a series of local grassroots movements. From the late 1960s, small groups came together to oppose the liberalisation of abortion in states like California, Colorado and New York. A fierce state-by-state conflict went national after Roe v Wade, says Mary Ziegler, a legal historian. She sees a parallel with the abortion-ballot movement. Like the anti-abortion movement, it is building a ground-level infrastructure that could enable it to become a powerful force nationally.
These days the pro-abortion-rights side has the momentum and the money. In 2022 and 2023 it outspent its opponents by almost two-to-one in Michigan and Ohio combined. It spent almost $50m in Michigan, making it the most expensive ballot measure in state history. Florida, with three of the country’s largest media markets and 13m registered voters to reach, is likely to be more expensive. Abortion-rights organisers expect to spend $68m in addition to the $19m already spent.
Various arms and political affiliates of Planned Parenthood, which provides health-care services including abortion, have given $17m in money and in kind, including $5m to the Florida initiative. Anti-abortion campaigns have been backed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a national organisation, and Catholic groups, including dioceses. The opposition campaigns admit they are on the back foot. “We are definitely going to be under financially resourced,” says Aaron DiPietro, of the Florida Family Policy Council. Their campaign labels the proposed amendment as extreme and overly broad.
The Florida initiative needs 60% of the vote to pass, a higher bar than any post-Dobbs abortion referendum has had to clear. In only two of the six states that have held referendums, California and Vermont, did the abortion-rights side get such a large share. When Michigan held its referendum in 2022, 57% voted in favour of protecting abortion even though 63% broadly supported the procedure, a rate similar to Floridians.
chart: the economist
Lawsuits have been filed to try to block referendums on abortion, citing things such as confusing language and insufficient space between letters in the petitions. Another tactic is to use direct democracy to buttress abortion restrictions. In Nebraska, two abortion-related ballot initiatives are vying for signatures. One would enshrine the right to abortion up to the point of viability; the other would reinforce current state law by prohibiting abortion after 12 weeks. If both reach the ballot and get over 50% of votes, the one with the most votes will prevail. In a few states, including Iowa and Pennsylvania, legislators are trying to add anti-abortion amendments to the ballot.
A still greater obstacle to the efforts to liberalise abortion laws through citizen-led ballot initiatives is that not all states allow them. Only 24 out of 50 give citizens the power to try to change state laws or constitutions through ballot initiatives. Those states are concentrated in the west. They enshrined the right in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of the Progressive movement. Few of the southern states with strict abortion bans allow citizens to change the law in the same fashion.
Protecting abortion in America as a whole can be achieved only through conventional politics. More politicians with liberal views on abortion would have to be elected to state legislatures, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency—who could in turn change laws and appoint more liberal justices. Democrats heartily agree. They hope to harness the furious energy of the movement, and exploit the fact that more Americans trust Mr Biden than Mr Trump on abortion, making it a rare area of strength for him.
So far, ballot initiatives seem to have boosted turnout among people who are more likely to vote for the Democrats. In Michigan, the abortion referendum in 2022 may help explain why 37% of young people came out to vote in that year’s midterm elections, according to analysis from Tufts University. The national youth turnout was just 23%. In Kansas, which held a referendum in August 2022, women accounted for 62% of new voter registrations in the previous month, according to l2, a data firm.
A still more enticing prospect is that voters could be pulled away from the Republican camp. The midterm elections in 2022 hinted at that, too. Although only 14% of registered Republican voters were upset about the Dobbs ruling, a quarter of that group voted for a Democrat in their House district, according to analysis by Gary Jacobson at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology find a similar correlation: Republicans and independents who saw abortion as an important issue were more likely to vote for Democrats in 2022 than two years earlier. It is probably one reason a predicted “red wave” lifting Republican candidates failed to appear.
Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who is running for an open Senate seat in Arizona, hopes to hitch his fortunes to the abortion-rights locomotive. He praises the ballot-initiative campaign often, and petitions circulate at his campaign events. In a tv advert, he tells viewers that “We are at a crossroads” on abortion. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is trying to ensure that voters in battleground districts know about Republicans’ efforts to ban abortion nationwide.
In May a pro-Democratic group launched a $25m volley of ads in swing states, in which women accused Mr Trump of making their lives hell. Much more of that is to come. Between January and March 2022, less than 1% of Democratic adverts mentioned abortion, according to AdImpact, a research firm. By October of that year almost 40% did, and the proportion has barely dropped. Since the midterms, the Democrats and their backers have spent $123m on such adverts—over five times as much as Republicans.
Mr Biden’s campaign has paid for television advertisements in Arizona and Florida. One featured a Marine veteran labelling Mr Trump “not tough” for taking away women’s freedom. Others feature women’s stories of being deprived of medically needed abortions, with the label “Donald Trump did this.” The campaign is now trying to persuade Americans that Mr Trump would sign a national abortion ban if he were re-elected. He has avoided being drawn on the issue, but a recent poll by Navigator Research, a progressive pollster, suggests that a majority of Americans believe he would sign.
George Bush’s narrow victory in the presidential election in 2004 was initially ascribed to the anti-gay-marriage referendums that were on the ballot in around a dozen states. Academics are still arguing about that (some say that the threat of terrorism was more important). But the ballot initiatives appear to have mobilised white evangelical Protestants, including in Ohio, the crucial swing state that year.
“We’re not talking about a massive tide of people turning out,” says David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. If the abortion referendums mobilise voters, the effect will be felt at the margins. But turnout has been an important factor in recent presidential elections, and small advantages in swing states can be decisive. Mr Campbell points out that taking away a right can electrify voters, and Dobbs was unprecedented in withdrawing a constitutional right that Americans had relied on for so long.
Signing up the silent majorityphotograph: getty images
Campaigners for the ballot initiatives mostly welcome the attention. But they are keen to separate the abortion-rights issue from partisan politics. “Our job is to make sure that we are getting our message out to as broad a coalition as we possibly can,” says Chris Love from the Arizona campaign. “I think that Democrats really need to make sure that they’re doing their job and speaking to their base of voters, because our base of voters is different.”
Over one in three signatures in Florida comes from a Republican or an independent. In the referendums held so far, the vote to protect abortion has been larger than the vote for the top Democratic candidate. The biggest gap was in Kentucky, where in the 2022 midterms 52.3% voted against restricting abortion whereas only 38.2% voted for the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Charles Booker. In Michigan the abortion proposal received 56.7% of the vote compared with 54.5% for Gretchen Whitmer, the governor.
The movement’s impact on the 2024 election might not be as big as Democrats hope. But in the long run, it could change America’s abortion politics profoundly. Abortion access has long been backed by a strong majority, but until recently the support was largely passive. Dobbs changed that. It also threw the issue back to 50 individual states rather than to the nation as a whole, all but ensuring, for the foreseeable future, a patchwork system riddled with inequality and fraught legal and moral questions. The ballot movement is the majority’s first effort to take back control.
Eventually, unless public opinion changes or American democracy falters, the movement is likely to succeed. It is hard for courts or legislatures to resist indefinitely the adoption of any policy favoured by 60% or more of the public. This is particularly true about questions of personal choice and liberty. From alcohol prohibition to same-sex marriage to marijuana decriminalisation, liberalising majorities have eventually overcome restrictions imposed by conservative lawmakers. The ballot movement has provided America’s silent abortion-rights coalition with a voice and with momentum, although it may take years or decades to fully nationalise a legal right to choose.
Back at the Arizona trailhead, the signature collectors are busy. “I’ve thought about it some more and I’d like to sign,” says a father as he returns from the mountain with his teenage daughter. “I signed because I’m a woman and I’ve been dealing with this shit all my life,” says a fit-looking 82-year-old, who starts recruiting others in the car park. Myaa, a bespectacled 18-year-old in a Minnie Mouse t-shirt, needs no convincing (“Oooh, yes please”). She needed an abortion last year and it was a lot of hassle, involving parental sign-off, a notary, “lies” by authorities and a humiliating $1,000 loan. She hasn’t decided whether she will vote yet. If she does, she says she would go for Mr Trump.■
Asia | Four legs good
Bans on dog meat sweep across Asia
Three reasons lie behind the cuddly trend
The hound and the furyphotograph: getty images
May 30th 2024
Gamey and rich, the first thing that grabs you about dog meat is the smell. Next, the taste: a fusion of beef and mutton, as one culinary adventurer has written. Last, the origin, and that is what sticks. Of the perhaps 30m dogs ending up in stews and barbecues across Asia, many begin as strays or pets. Even when farmed, it is a grim business. Unlike pigs and cows, dogs carry rabies; vaccinations are not routine. Campaigners accuse farmers of brutal slaughter techniques. But consumption endures. Some Asians prize dog meat as a delicacy: a savoury delight, a ward against bad luck or a supposed palliative for heat.
Lately, though, Asia has been ditching dog. In January South Korea joined China, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore in banning the dog-meat trade. Cat meat is sometimes banned, too. Regional bans have spread, from Cambodia’s Siem Reap province to India’s Nagaland state. Enforcement is being tightened. In February officials in Hong Kong arrested five Vietnamese caught hawking frozen dog and cat meat. Even in Vietnam, where the trade is still legal, shops are closing.
The first reason is rising pet ownership. As Asians have fewer babies, pets offer companionship. South Korea and Taiwan have as many pet dogs and cats as children aged 14 and under. In Thailand pets outnumber children by roughly 7m. One in four South Koreans owns a pet, mostly dogs, up from one in six in 2012. The puppy love extends to the president, Yoon Suk Yeol, who has six dogs and eight cats. “It feels like we’ve become a dog republic,” lamented the head of Korea’s dog-farming trade body. Asia’s pet-food market is growing faster than Europe’s or America’s, expanding 9% a year until 2029, according to Mordor Intelligence, a consultancy.
The second is dogged efforts by campaigners. Groups like Dog Meat Free Indonesia (dmfi) channel global attention. Western celebrities such as Ricky Gervais, a comedian, feature heavily in dmfi’s recent campaign. It jostles law enforcement to arrest dog traffickers and embeds in raids on dog slaughterhouses. China’s VShine, an animal-welfare group, boasts of getting dog meat removed from menus in Bengbu and Zhengzhou.
The final reason for the shift is social media. Asians make up more than 60% of users. Online, pet content is king. Canny activists pair viral animal-abuse videos with calls to action. Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s incoming president, endeared himself to young voters through Instagram videos cuddling his cat. As pets become friends and not food, he is unlikely to be the last leader to do so. ■
China | Beware the work team
The evolution of forced labour in Xinjiang
China has wound down its re-education camps, but is still using work to remould the thinking of Uyghurs
photograph: alamy
May 30th 2024
In a village near the ancient Silk Road town of Yarkand, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in the far-western region of Xinjiang, the gongzuodui has been busy. The term means “work team”. In Xinjiang it refers to a group of officials dispatched to a poor rural area to change the way Muslim residents live and think. In this village, called Konabazar, the team has been engaged in “ideological mobilisation”. The aim is to persuade reluctant farmers to head off and do other forms of work.
It is all but impossible for journalists to find out what those ethnic-Uyghur farmers made of the work team’s efforts, which involved lecturing villagers at flag-raising ceremonies and holding night-school classes. Since early 2017, when China began sending a million or more people, most of them Uyghurs, to “vocational education and training centres” (detention camps, in effect), it has become increasingly difficult to get first-hand accounts from victims of China’s repression in Xinjiang. The state justifies its actions in the name of stamping out terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. Western scholars believe the camps were wound down around 2020. But they say official accounts, such as the report about Konabazar, suggest widespread forced labour is still being used for a similar purpose.
chart: the economist
Western governments have grown increasingly wary of this. In 2021 President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act. It assumes that any product from Xinjiang may be tainted by forced labour—importers have to prove otherwise to get such goods into America. In April the European Parliament approved rules aimed at blocking imports to the European Union of goods made with forced labour (they are likely to take effect in 2027). The situation in Xinjiang animated the drafters: eu imports from the region were worth $641m in the first four months of this year, up 721% on the same period in 2016, before huge numbers began entering the camps (see chart).
Such legal barriers to Xinjiang-related trade are a headache for many companies. In 2022 James Cockayne and fellow researchers at the University of Nottingham produced a report called “Making Xinjiang sanctions work”. It estimated that Xinjiang-made polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar panels, accounted for about 95% of photovoltaic energy supplied to grids in the world’s top 30 solar-power-producing countries. The report also said Xinjiang was making about 18% of the globally traded volume of processed tomato products and that one in five garments made worldwide contained cotton from Xinjiang.
For firms seeking to exclude forced labour from their supply chains, the complexity of the way such abuses occur in Xinjiang compounds the difficulty. They have to be aware of different forms of forced labour. One involves workers who had been in the re-education centres. This group could number in the hundreds of thousands, says Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an ngo in Washington. Some of them could still be working in factories that were set up around the camps, with limited access to the outside world and no freedom to leave.
Another form may involve prisons. Many of the camps’ inmates were put into formal detention, pending trial. Yalkun Uluyol, a Uyghur living abroad, describes how his father, a honey-melon trader, underwent such a transfer. He was given a 16-year prison sentence in 2022. The son, a researcher on Uyghurs’ rights, believes the punishment was merely related to his father’s connection with him. Other relatives were also given lengthy terms, he says.
In 2022 the Associated Press (ap), an American news agency, obtained a list of more than 10,000 people sentenced for offences such as terrorism, religious extremism or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a common pretext for jailing dissidents. They all came from one county in southern Xinjiang: Konasheher, not far from Yarkand. The report did not say whether any had previously been held in re-education centres (most were arrested in 2017). But it hinted at the scale of incarceration as a weapon against the state’s perceived enemies in Xinjiang. The ap calculated that Konasheher had a rate of imprisonment 30 times higher than the whole of China’s in 2013, the most recent year for which national data are available.
Work is a common part of prison life in China, and sometimes involves products that enter global supply chains. America’s government says there is evidence that inmates in Xinjiang are forced to toil in various ways, including in agriculture and mining. Some factories related to polysilicon-production are next to prisons, possibly indicating a link, according to the academics in Nottingham.
But a large part of forced labour in Xinjiang may not involve obvious signs of compulsion. People are kept at work by an implicit message: leave a state-assigned job and you are in trouble. This is the type under way in Konabazar. It is often referred to as “poverty alleviation through labour transfer”. On the surface it sounds much like what has been happening across China since the economic reforms of the late 1970s, with people moving from poor villages into cities to work.
In the rest of China this has rarely smacked of forced labour (except, perhaps, in Tibet—though some experts dispute whether the term should be used even there). In Xinjiang, however, it is different. In recent years it has become clear that the government is using the process to tighten political control over rural Muslim communities, mainly of Uyghurs who form about 45% of Xinjiang’s population of 26m. It is likely that some Uyghurs have been joining labour-transfer schemes out of fear. That is because of the terror generated by the now-defunct re-education camps, by numerous arrests of suspected critics of the government, and by a clampdown on expressions of Muslim or Uyghur identity.
Mr Zenz calls this a “non-internment state-imposed form of forced labour”. The term was adopted in February by the International Labour Organisation (ilo), a un body, in an updated handbook on forced-labour practices. The ilo did not mention Xinjiang, but referred to schemes sounding much like its labour-transfer system.
Xinjiang’s efforts appear to have been growing in recent years. In 2017, the year the camps opened, there were 2.75m transfers (a rural resident may take more than one job a year outside his or her village). There were more than 3m in 2022. Last year the government aimed for a number similar to that of 2017. But it reached 3.2m, official data show. Some of those affected work in factories near their villages; some are sent farther afield, including to other provinces (where they are often kept under close watch). They may also do seasonal jobs, such as harvesting cotton. Kicking them off their land helps to motivate them: officials often seize it to make way for projects such as industrial zones or to enable larger-scale farming. Konabazar has been promoting a “small-fields-merge-into-big-fields” campaign, a system that usually involves giving rent in exchange for land.
In 2020 an officially approved book, “Stories of Poverty Alleviation in Southern Xinjiang”, described the aims of a work team in another part of the region. One was to raise incomes in the village, in part by using labour transfers. Another was to eliminate “religious extremism” in a community riddled with “indolence”. It describes how the team leader confronted a particularly lazy villager. “You don’t want to work, right? Fine, I won’t give you a single pound of fertiliser, and I won’t build you a house,” the official said. “At the end of the year, when everyone else has escaped poverty and is living a good life, you can stay in your broken house and live your miserable life!” The team leader eventually succeeded in persuading the villager to work. They almost always do. ■
United States | The 3% party
What are America’s Libertarians for?
They are grappling with whether to go for national influence or local wins
photograph: haiyun jiang/the new york times/redux/eyevine
May 28th 2024|washington, dc
Donald trump should have seen it coming. He arrived on May 25th at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington, dc, hoping to expand his support, but the crowd mostly responded with boos. Attendees lacked enthusiasm for a protectionist who added $8.4trn to America’s national debt. They also spent the weekend squabbling among themselves. After losing presidential races for more than half a century, the Libertarian Party is facing an identity crisis.
Libertarians share a baseline belief that the state best serves the people by leaving them alone. Yet for a party that peaked at 3.3% of the popular vote in 2016 it harbours a striking amount of intellectual diversity. Convention attendees could join the Bitcoin Caucus (“Got inflation?”) or the Emo Caucus (“Live Free or Cry”). A pair from the Pro Life Libertarian Caucus wore Make Argentina Great Again hats, a nod to Javier Milei, the country’s libertarian president. One booth advertised a tantalising, if dubious, proposition: “Opting out of income tax. It’s not just for millionaires.”
The Radical Caucus offered free campaign buttons: many called for the abolition of government agencies, from the cia to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A particularly efficient Libertarian could opt for the “Abolish All the Things” design. Those with more niche interests could pick “Sell the Grand Canyon”, “Let’s Buy Machine Guns From Vending Machines” or “Re-Legalize Khat”.
The most intense divisions are about strategy. The hardline Mises Caucus (named after Ludwig von Mises, a pro-market Austrian economist) has dominated the party’s leadership since 2022 and adopted populist rhetoric. The group was responsible for inviting Mr Trump, as well as Robert F. Kennedy junior, an independent candidate, to speak at the convention. The debate about whether to invite the outside candidates at times seemed more heated than the Libertarians’ own presidential-nomination fight. On May 24th, the convention’s first day, one attendee yelled into the microphone, “I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” The crowd cheered.
“I would rather us focus on the Libertarian candidates,” said Jim Fulner, from the Radical Caucus. “I’m fearful that come later this summer, when I’m working the county fair, someone will say, ‘Oh, Libertarians, you guys are the Donald Trump people.’” Nick Apostolopoulos, from California, welcomed the attention Mr Trump’s speech brought—and said his presence proved “this party matters, and that they have to try and appeal to this voting bloc.”
Few believed that Mr Trump won much support. He promised to appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet and commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who is serving life in prison after founding the dark-web equivalent of Amazon for illegal drugs. The crowd responded positively to Mr Trump’s nod to a Libertarian cause célèbre, but booed after he asked them to choose him as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee. Mr Trump hit back, “If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”
Mr Kennedy was more disciplined, tailoring his speech to the crowd by highlighting his opposition to covid lockdowns. Even so he received a cool reception. Libertarians want a candidate who will promise to abolish, not reform, government agencies.
The reality is that Libertarians are more interested in positions than personalities. The exception may be the broad admiration for Ron Paul, a retired Republican congressman whom many cite as their lodestar. But at 88 Mr Paul has achieved the difficult feat of being considered too old to plausibly run for president.
The party opted for someone 50 years younger but virtually unknown on the national stage. Chase Oliver, a former Libertarian candidate in Georgia for the United States Senate, won the nomination on the seventh ballot. Hitherto, his greatest political accomplishment was pulling in 2% of the vote in the Peach State, which forced a run-off between the Democratic and Republican candidates. Aligned with the more left-leaning Classical Liberal Caucus, he took aim at Mr Trump and Mr Kennedy in his acceptance speech. He said he wants to unify the party.
But the party is far from unified. Given the choice between Mr Oliver and “none of the above”, more than a third of the delegates preferred no one. It remains uncertain whether the party’s candidate will appear on the ballot in all 50 states, as several previous nominees have. If the Libertarian candidate has any influence on the presidential election this year, it will be as a spoiler in a close-run swing state.
Mr Oliver’s victory marked a rare defeat for the Mises Caucus. But the re-election of Angela McArdle, a Mises Caucus member, as the national party chairperson is perhaps more important to the future of the movement. Ms McArdle faced criticism for her decision to invite outside candidates to speak. Controversy over the Mises Caucus had led several state delegations to split, and much of the convention’s floor time was eaten up over fights about whom to recognise. The rise of the Mises wing of the party has led more pragmatically minded members to largely give up on the project of advancing libertarian ideas by building a political party.
The party struggles on big stages, such as in presidential, gubernatorial or Senate contests. Yet it occasionally wins municipal elections, leaving some to wonder whether national activism is pointless or even counter-productive. Why would Libertarians invest time in a hopeless race for president when they could direct their energy to fighting a local sales tax or antiquated laws restricting alcohol sales?
Thinking small
Andy Craig, director of election policy at the Rainey Centre, a think-tank, was involved in the Libertarian Party for about a decade but disengaged after growing frustrated with the Mises Caucus. He knows several Libertarians who have turned to local activism: “They’re getting wins at the ballot box and in city councils and some state legislatures.”
The party faithful believe that national and local activism are not mutually exclusive. Elijah Gizzarelli won fewer than 3,000 votes when he ran for governor of Rhode Island as a Libertarian two years ago, but he argues that the party has a long record of success—so long as the definition of success expands beyond winning elections. He says the party succeeds by shifting the “Overton window”, or the spectrum of political ideas that are generally considered acceptable.
Asked about a Libertarian debate years ago when a candidate was jeered for supporting driving licences, Mr Gizzarelli smiles and says this proves his point. “For people that haven’t been exposed to Libertarian thoughts…and conversations, I can imagine how something like ‘no driver’s licence’ sounds crazy,” he acknowledges, before suggesting that drivers would still learn competency behind the wheel from friends and family. “If you actually think about what would happen without driver’s licences, you’d be like, ‘Oh, ok, it’s not a big deal at all.’”■
United States | No joke
The side-effects of the TikTok tussle
As the app’s future hangs in the balance, the ramifications of the battle are becoming clearer
The pursuit of appinessphotograph: getty images
May 30th 2024|new york
Joe biden’s re-election campaign wants you to know that the president is funny. To prove it, examples of his hilarity are posted almost daily to his TikTok page. One video, peppered with fire emojis, shows him cracking jokes about Donald Trump. Viewers have their own gag: isn’t he trying to ban this app?
The government says it is not banning TikTok but has given it an ultimatum: sell to a suitable non-Chinese owner by January or shut down. It deems TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese firm, to be controlled by a “foreign adversary” and to be a national-security threat. Politicians accuse China of using TikTok to steal Americans’ data and spread propaganda.
TikTok denies these charges and is suing. So are its users. They argue that divestment is “simply not possible” (China could block it) and Congress is “singling out and banning TikTok”, in violation of the First Amendment rights of its 170m American users. Imposing restrictions on speech in favour of national security is an “extraordinarily high bar”, says Ashley Gorski of the American Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group. It requires concrete evidence that TikTok poses an imminent, serious threat—something Ms Gorski and others argue the government has not provided. Lawmakers were briefed on TikTok’s risks in private, but little has been made public.
The dispute will probably reach the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the ramifications of the tussle are becoming clearer. They go well beyond TikTok.
The law includes criteria for a president to add other companies. Any platform with more than 1m monthly active users in America and at least 20% owned by a foreigner based in one of the four “adversary” countries—China, Iran, North Korea and Russia—could be targeted. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, says this brings social media up to date with foreign-ownership limits on other media.
Some worry that the scope of the law is too broad. Video-games and other messaging services are potentially in the line of fire. The government could widen the definition of adversary countries, says Corbin Barthold, at TechFreedom, a think-tank. Many expect other countries to cite America’s move against TikTok as justification for targeting foreign apps they disagree with, potentially further fragmenting the global internet. Shutting TikTok in America would be “a gift to authoritarians around the world”, warns Ramya Krishnan, at the Knight Institute, a free-speech centre at Columbia University.
photograph: tiktok/bidenhq
TikTok’s efforts to oppose the legislation may have subjected it to further regulatory scrutiny. It sent notifications to its users urging them to call Congress and “stop a TikTok shutdown”. Mr Krishnamoorthi claims Capitol Hill was “flooded” with calls, many from children, some of whom allegedly did not know what a congressman was. He is calling for an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission, a trustbuster, into whether that broke child-privacy laws. “The power that a foreign adversary has with that app was underscored by their influence campaign,” he says. TikTok denies these allegations and says the calls were from “voting-age people”.
The firm insists that it is doing its best to co-operate with the government and has protected Americans’ data “in a way that no other company has done”. In its lawsuit TikTok claims it gave the authorities an “extraordinary” option to suspend the app if it was found to violate provisions of a draft national-security agreement negotiated through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a watchdog. The company says the Biden administration has ignored this effort, and the $2bn-plus it has invested in Project Texas, a collaboration with Oracle, a tech giant, to wall off Americans’ data from ByteDance.
Mr Krishnamoorthi is unimpressed. The government worked for “years” with TikTok to try to mitigate national-security risks, he says. “You couldn’t trust anything that they said about Project Texas.”
For now, Mr Biden’s campaign can meme away on TikTok throughout the election season. Mr Trump—who tried to ban TikTok under an executive order in 2020 but has since reversed his position—is apparently mulling a campaign launch on the app, according to the Washington Post. The maga super pac has already entered the ring. It would all be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high. ■
Middle East and Africa | Occupation and responsibility
Who is responsible for feeding Gaza?
Arguments fly over Israel’s duty to maintain aid
photograph: ap
May 29th 2024|dubai
An estimated 1m Palestinians have fled Rafah since the start of Israel’s offensive there on May 6th. For those who remain, the fighting has had grisly consequences. At least 45 people, including a number of children, died on May 26th after an Israeli air strike set fire to a tent camp; survivors had to pull charred bodies from the wreckage. Even those who evacuated are not entirely safe: dozens more were killed two days later in a strike near al-Mawasi, a so-called “humanitarian zone” for displaced civilians.
Less macabre, but just as consequential, is what the offensive has done to the flows of aid that have kept 2.2m Palestinians alive throughout eight months of war. Consider the statistics from one recent day. The Israeli army said that 370 lorries of aid reached Gaza on May 27th, 154 of them via Kerem Shalom, a border crossing in the south. Yet the un’s official tally from that day recorded zero lorries at Kerem Shalom. Neither side is lying—nor, though, are they telling the whole truth. The confusing figures show how Israel’s campaign in Rafah has complicated deliveries of aid.
Until it began, most of the aid reaching Gaza did so by lorry in the south, where it was collected by the un. Of the 27,608 lorries that entered between the start of the war and May 6th, around 25,000 went via the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings (see map). Over 90% of those lorries delivered goods to the un and other charities; only a small fraction carried cargo ordered by private firms.
map: the economist
Deliveries reached an all-time high in April, when 5,671 lorries entered Gaza via the two southern crossings. There were also new routes for shipments to other parts of the enclave. In May Israel opened a new crossing, called West Erez, which could handle deliveries in the north. America inaugurated a temporary pier to receive supplies by sea. After months of shortages, aid workers were hopeful that the humanitarian situation was improving.
chart: the economist
Then Israeli troops began their push into Rafah. It has caused two big problems. First is the supply of aid. Egypt stopped sending lorries to the Rafah crossing after Israeli troops seized it. Kerem Shalom has, at times, been too dangerous to use (partly because Hamas keeps firing rockets at it). The week before the Rafah offensive began, the un received 1,601 lorries through those crossings; the week after, it recorded 63 (see chart). Most lorries entering in the south are now bound for private firms, not charities. They show up in Israel’s statistics, but not in the un’s.
On most days the West Erez crossing now handles a majority of the aid entering Gaza. In the two weeks before the Rafah offensive, just 94 aid lorries used that route; in the two weeks after it began, 465 of them did. That is a five-fold increase, but it does not make up for the much larger drop in aid flows in the south.
Nor does the maritime route. In its first week the American-built pier received around 1,100 tonnes of aid—the equivalent of eight lorries a day. On May 28th the Pentagon said the pier had been damaged and needed to be towed to Israel for repairs.
Moreover, both the pier and the West Erez crossing are in northern Gaza, which has been largely depopulated. That points to a second issue. The daily figures from the Israeli army count all the lorries that clear security screening and unload their goods on the Gazan side of the border. But those deliveries are little help to Gazans unless someone can pick up the supplies and deliver them where they are needed.
Until May 6th, the un was largely responsible for that: it sent hundreds of lorries each day to collect aid from the southern crossings. With most of Gaza’s 2.2m people huddled in Rafah, most aid stayed there as well; many un lorries had to drive only a few kilometres to drop their cargo at warehouses and government offices.
Now, though, the un says it is often too dangerous to send drivers to Kerem Shalom. Since May 6th it has dispatched just 169 lorries (an average of seven a day). On May 21st the un halted food distribution in Rafah, citing logistical glitches. Deliveries in the north can be fraught as well: much of the aid that came via the American-built pier was seized by hungry crowds before it reached un warehouses.
Private firms have fewer qualms about security: they send dozens of lorries to Kerem Shalom each day to collect goods and deliver them to makeshift markets. With less aid entering Gaza, these markets are now a vital lifeline. But shoppers say the prices are often high and erratic.
This makes for a bleak picture. Food, medicine and other essentials are still getting into Gaza, but some shipments are stuck in staging areas on the border. Others are sold at prices that few Gazans can afford. Israel, though, insists that it is meeting its duties under international law.
Warring states have no duty to feed the enemy, only a “duty to facilitate”: they must allow neutral parties to deliver humanitarian aid, which Israel has done with the un. But those duties change if they become occupying powers. Then they must “ensure the provision” of basic supplies. It is not enough passively to allow food into the territory; occupiers must themselves actively provide supplies if they are needed and cannot get through by other means.
Under international law, an army becomes an occupying power once it can exercise “effective control” over a territory. The meaning of that phrase is debated. Many Israeli lawyers argue their country cannot be deemed to occupy Gaza: it has not set up a formal administration there, and its troops have withdrawn from many areas they once controlled. Perhaps Israel has been the occupying power for limited periods in particular areas, they concede, but not in Gaza as a whole.
Yet Israel now controls all of Gaza’s land borders, its coastline and its air space. It has thousands of troops in Rafah, a smaller number deployed along a corridor that bisects the enclave, and the freedom to send forces anywhere it wishes. It has not set up a military government for Gaza—but it has the power to do so.
To many, that looks like effective control. David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, called Israel an occupying power in March. On May 20th a panel of experts convened by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court found that Israel was “certainly” an occupying power “in all of or at least in substantial parts of Gaza”. The prosecutor accused Israel’s prime minister and its defence minister of inflicting “starvation as a method of war” in his request for arrest warrants in May.
For almost eight months, Israel has resisted calls to deliver aid to Gazans directly and urged the un to do more. But the fighting in Rafah has left the un paralysed. Whatever the legal arguments, if the offensive leads to greater hunger and disease in Gaza, many will hold Israel responsible. ■
The Americas | Double trouble
Bolivia’s left wing is at war with itself
The feud is preventing the government from addressing a looming economic crisis
photograph: getty images
May 30th 2024|la paz
Meetings of the Movimiento al Socialismo (mas) used to be soporific affairs. Not any more. These days they erupt into brawls, with bottles and chairs soaring over the mêlée, before they are broken up with tear gas.
The change reflects a rift at the top of Bolivia’s governing party, where President Luis Arce and Evo Morales, a former holder of the post, are fighting to lead the mas into next year’s elections. It has paralysed the government, split the indigenous and labour groups that form the party’s base, and offered the opposition its first sniff of real power in almost 20 years.
In 2005 Mr Morales led the mas to win the first majority in Bolivian politics since the country returned to democracy in 1982. In the next election he won a supermajority in congress. The mas has governed Bolivia for all-but-one year since. Mr Morales, a former coca grower who threw the us Drug Enforcement Agency out of Bolivia, became a leftist icon.
The hegemony cracked in 2019 when Mr Morales ran for an unconstitutional third consecutive term. He won, but allegations of fraud sparked protests. The army asked Mr Morales to resign, which he did, going into exile. An interim government took over for a year—a transition of power which the mas now views as a coup—before the mas swept back to power under Mr Arce, Mr Morales’s chosen candidate, in 2020. Mr Morales returned to Bolivia, eyeing the election due in 2025.
It soon became clear that Mr Arce wanted to stay in power. Mr Morales has the support of his ex-ministers and rural workers’ unions. Mr Arce, who lacks Mr Morales’s charisma, controls the state and its largesse. Until recently, many Bolivians thought Mr Arce the prudent economic choice, due to strong growth while he was finance minister under Mr Morales and low inflation since he became president. But a creaking economy is changing that.
The fight has hamstrung the government. Mr Arce cannot count on votes from legislators loyal to Mr Morales. This limits his response to an economic crisis stemming from the depletion of Bolivia’s foreign-exchange reserves. He has struggled to get legislative approval to take loans from multilateral development banks, and is unable to pass a law to let foreign companies extract Bolivian lithium. A meltdown would destroy Mr Arce’s reputation.
Attempts at reconciliation, such as holding a national party congress, have foundered; Messrs Arce and Morales each held their own and denied the legitimacy of the other. Mr Morales has challenged Mr Arce to compete with him in primaries, but the government insists that the constitution bars Mr Morales from running. Mr Morales warns of a “convulsion” in Bolivia if he is disqualified.
The opposition smells opportunity. Carlos Mesa, a former president, may well run again for Comunidad Ciudadana, a coalition of centrists. Luis Fernando Camacho, in pre-trial detention for an alleged role in the 2019 “coup”, may run for Creemos, a right-wing party. Many others have joined the race, all calling to unite the opposition. None of them seems to excite the voters. Only Messrs Morales and Arce can keep mas from power. ■
Europe | Captive in the Caucasus
Georgia’s government cosies up to Russia
Pro-Western Georgians seem powerless to stop it
Tbilisi nightmarephotograph: getty images
May 30th 2024|tbilisi
There are no Russian tanks rumbling towards Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, or Russian missiles flying over it—both things that happened during a five-day incursion in 2008 when the Kremlin attacked its former imperial vassal. But Georgia is still in mortal peril. The struggle between Soviet past and possible European future has already devastated Ukraine, and plunged Russia itself into a state of dictatorship. Now it has spread to the Caucasus, threatening Georgia’s democracy, its independence and its Euro-Atlantic calling.
Once considered a beacon of democracy and a staunch Western ally, Georgia is being pushed into Russia’s sphere of influence and away from the West, not by Russian soldiers but by its own ruler, a reclusive businessman named Bidzina Ivanishvili. He made his billions in Russia in the 1990s and has ruled Georgia since 2012, largely from behind the scenes through the party he founded, Georgian Dream.
For ten years, Mr Ivanishvili kept up a pretence of democracy and trod a careful line between Russia and the West. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, though, he has thrown in his lot with Russia and has openly turned against the West, which he calls a “party of global war”. Georgia has reopened direct flights to Russia and helps it evade sanctions, as shown by increased trade flows. At the same time its helmeted police and vigilante thugs assault the young Westernised Georgians who have taken to the streets in protest. So far, the government has had the upper hand.
The trigger for the current crisis was a menacing law, nicknamed the “Russia law” by its critics, copied from Mr Putin’s lexicon. It requires any organisation that gets more than 20% of its funding from Western sources to register as an “agent of foreign influence”. On May 18th the law, which had easily passed through parliament, was vetoed by Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia’s president, for “contradicting our constitutions and all European standards”. But on May 28th Georgia’s parliament voted to override that veto, in good time for parliamentary elections in October.
Georgia’s democracy has been grounded not in strong institutions, competing political parties or an independent judiciary, but in its vibrant civil society, including the media and the often Western-funded institutions that provide checks and balances on political power. The law will force many of them to restrict their operations, shut down or leave the country, for fear of stigma and “harassing and costly audits”, as the Venice Commission, a committee of European lawyers, puts it. Those affected could include election monitors and pollsters such as the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, two important American ngos. The law could also make it easier for Mr Ivanishvili to manipulate election results.
Besides the foreign-agent law, another is in the offing that could turn Georgia into a tax haven where cronies of Mr Ivanishvili could bank assets from all over the world, including Russia. The combination amounts to state capture by Mr Ivanishvili and turns Georgia into a private operation, says David Zedelashvili, a Tbilisi lawyer. The laws also make Georgia’s path towards nato and eu membership difficult or impossible, even though both goals are enshrined in its constitution.
No bloodbath yet
The protests, some attended by tens of thousands of people, have stayed peaceful and gone unheeded. Georgia’s youth has no appetite for a revolution. The eu flags they wave and the Georgian songs they sing are poor protection against the police, who have attacked them with tear-gas and truncheons, or thugs who follow them and beat them up outside their homes.
Mr Ivanishvili is equally undeterred by Western criticism. On May 14th Jim O’Brien, an American assistant secretary of state, flew to Tbilisi; Mr Ivanishvili refused to meet him. America has introduced visa restrictions for Georgians who are responsible for the foreign-agent law and is reviewing its financial assistance to Georgia, including to its armed forces.
America faces a dilemma. Georgia has been its ally, its soldiers fighting alongside American ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. For all of Mr Ivanishvili’s drift away from the West, Georgia’s military and intelligence services are keener than ever on their ties with America, notes a Western official.
Turning Georgia decisively against the West would be a victory for Mr Putin and a humiliation for nato as it celebrates its 75th anniversary later this year. But Mr Putin’s plans for Georgia extend beyond symbolism. He has designated the Russian-controlled breakaway region of Abkhazia as a new naval base for its Black Sea fleet that has been pushed out of Crimea by Ukrainian forces.
Mr Putin may be aiming to create a form of confederation between Georgia and its two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which he also controls. The idea was tested (unsuccessfully) when the Kremlin first fomented conflict in Donbas in 2014, then tried to push it back into Ukraine as a way to secure a veto over its European trajectory. Speaking on Georgia’s independence day on May 26th, Irakli Kobakhidze, the Georgian Dream prime minister who is driving his country towards the Kremlin, promised that by 2030 “Georgians should be living alongside their Abkhazian and Ossetian brothers and sisters.” Pledging to defend Georgia’s sovereignty, Georgian Dream is making great strides to achieve the opposite. ■
Business | Bartleby
How to write the perfect CV
A job applicant walks into a bar
illustration: paul blow
May 30th 2024
Imagine meeting a stranger at a party. What makes for a successful encounter? Lesson one is to heed the wisdom of a shampoo commercial from the 1980s: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Lesson two is to remember that you do not need to wear a beret or a fur stole in order to stand out. Lesson three is not to forget that what you leave out matters as much as what you say.
These same principles, it turns out, apply to writing a cv. A resumé is not a list of every job you ever had. It is not your autobiography. It is, like that hair-care advert, a marketing tool. Your audience is made up of recruiters and hiring managers. Like cocktail-party guests, they do not take a long time to decide if they want to keep talking. According to one study, such professionals spend an average of 7.4 seconds skimming a job application. Your guest Bartleby has a few tips on how best to ensure that these seconds count.
The cv’s number-one task is not to put the reader off. If you are thinking of adding a watermark with your initials, think again; you are trying too hard. Use a clean, simple format and avoid fancy fonts (Arial or Helvetica are fine; Century Gothic is not).
Adding colour does not mean using a teal background. Nor does it mean using purple prose. Clichés can be a reason you are passed over for an interview. So can typos; spell-check and proofread over and over. You would be surprised how often someone forgets to include their name and contact details. Dispense with hackneyed descriptors (“cultivated and passionate professional”, “a keen eye for detail”)—facts should speak for themselves. But not all facts. You may think including your ranking on “Overwatch” is a quirky way to illustrate how quick you are on your feet. A recruiter may conclude that it shows you spend hours on the sofa tethered to a gaming console.
Do not hammer your cv out in an hour—take your time to polish it. Condense, filter and distil until what you are left with captures the essence of you. Anyone’s cv can fit on a page, even if you have held residencies in the world’s eight top hospitals or are Christine Lagarde. Forget the personal statement—no one has time for that. If you spent three weeks in the summer when you were 17 keeping the books in your uncle’s hardware store, no one needs to know that if you are now over the age of 25. The older you get, the more you should prioritise work experience over education.
Tailor your resumé for every application by making the relevant tweaks and highlighting different areas. Otherwise you are like the bore who tells the same story to every person he meets. Not everyone—and not every recruiter—is interested in the same things. If you can quantify an accomplishment, do. A second-year law student who just completed his summer internship having worked on six m&a deals? Put that in.
Reasonable gaps in a resumé are not cause for concern. Life happens and sometimes people take time off; you do not have to explain that you spent three months between jobs hiking around Machu Picchu to clear your head and recharge your batteries. A ten-year gap from the workforce may be another matter. So might constant job-switching, which is as much of a red flag to recruiters as admitting to never having had a long-term relationship might be to a stranger at a party. But if this describes your work history then you probably have bigger problems that a cv alone, no matter how masterful, will not fix.
Once you have sent your application, refrain from emailing prospective employers to see if they received it. You risk coming across as that annoying person who texts to see if their previous texts have got through.
In his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace, an American novelist, used the metaphor of fish oblivious to the element surrounding them in order to point to the dangers of the “natural, hard-wired, default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centred”. Your life, he implied, should illustrate an acute awareness of the outside world. So should your cv. Drafting a presentation of your skills and achievements will inevitably reflect the sovereignty and self-absorption of your “skull-sized kingdom”, as Wallace described it. So as you launch yourself into the job market, follow his counsel to young graduates to try always to be aware of their place in the greater scheme of things: “This is water…this is water.”
Business | Schumpeter
The soldiers of the silicon supply chain are worried
Geopolitics risks distorting a miracle of modern technology
illustration: brett ryder
May 30th 2024
There is a wry sense of seen-it-all-before in the crucible of the world’s semiconductor industry. When your columnist took the bullet train to Hsinchu Science Park, home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (tsmc), the world’s biggest chip producer, on May 24th, China was simulating a military encirclement of Taiwan in waters not far over the horizon. An invasion would be cataclysmic. A blockade could starve the island of vital energy resources. Even cyber-attacks could be crippling. Yet after decades of belligerence, many Taiwanese greet such threats with a shrug. “It’s nothing new to me,” chuckles one seasoned chip executive. “Since 1996 China has been throwing missiles.”
Semiconductor executives to whom Schumpeter spoke on a tour of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are not nearly as relaxed about America’s economic manoeuvres against China, though. They say sanctions, subsidies, tariffs and other blunt instruments of geopolitical rivalry and industrial policy may have strategic logic. But they jeopardise one of the miracles of modern technology: the fragile semiconductor supply chain that stretches from East Asia to America and Europe, with Taiwan at its crux. Along it silicon wafers are made and polished, etched with billions of nanometre-size transistors, sliced into microchips and packaged into the brain cells of the digital age. It is a process masterfully honed to combine government support with the invisible hand of the free market. The chip war threatens to bludgeon it.
Consider the ecosystem stretching outwards from tsmc’s Hsinchu headquarters. On one side of the entrance, with a driveway shaped like a silicon disc, is one of its many fabrication plants, or fabs. Across the street is umc, Taiwan’s other chip giant. Both companies emerged in the 1980s from the government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute. Since then a quasi-free market has flourished amid the rice fields of north-western Taiwan. Eight square kilometres (three square miles) house hundreds of suppliers, from asml, the Dutch maker of the world’s most cutting-edge lithography tools, to small laundries that ensure engineers’ white “bunny” suits are dust-free in the light-filled purity of the clean rooms.
The network stretches far beyond Taiwan. From South Korea, sk Hynix supplies tsmc with the latest high-bandwidth memory chips that are crucial for the graphics-processing units it makes on behalf of Nvidia, the artificial-intelligence juggernaut. In Japan, companies like Tokyo Electron, which makes other chipmaking tools, Resonac, producer of chemicals, and Advantest, which tests the quality of finished chips, work alongside numerous small firms to make the country the source of almost a third of equipment and more than half of materials used in chip manufacturing. At the start of the chain, China supplies raw materials like polysilicon. America, for its part, provides the most sophisticated chip designs that breathe life into smartphones and cloud servers.
Now picture a world divided into two semiconductor blocks, with America on one side and China the other, that aim to replicate this cat’s cradle of relationships in an effort to gain strategic autonomy. It is almost impossible to imagine. First, even for staunch American allies such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, China remains a crucial semiconductor market, notwithstanding American sanctions on tech firms like Huawei, and export controls on the sale of the most advanced microchips to the mainland. They would be loth to give it up, except in extremis.
Second, decoupling would come at a big cost. One of the marvels of the chip supply chain is how lean it is. The risk is that as big powers such as America offer large subsidies to “reshore” semiconductor manufacturing, the economics will be upended. Subsidies from America’s chips and Science Act, as well as investment tax credits, have helped entice tsmc to build three fabs in Arizona, at a planned cost of $65bn. The company believes it is in its own and its customers’ interests to diversify some of its operations beyond Taiwan. Yet America is not cheap: construction and labour costs are high. Moreover, though it can attract some big suppliers to move with it to America, smaller ones will need to be nurtured in the Arizona desert. This, too, will be expensive. In order to maintain its margins, tsmc has to persuade big customers, such as Apple, to pay more for the option of using American-made chips. Failing that, subsidies will need to flow indefinitely.
Third, consider how different cultures complicate the picture. In Taiwan, semiconductor engineers are renowned for dropping everything, day or night, to fix problems. That helped the industry survive a big earthquake in April with minimal disruption, just as it did the covid-19 pandemic. In America there is, to put it mildly, more regard for work-life balance—and that is if you can find enough qualified semiconductor engineers in the first place.
Headaches aside, many in the industry understand America’s desire to thwart China. They know that China plays hardball with American firms; they accept the region is rife with industrial policy; they understand that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have to pay a price for living under America’s security blanket. They are loyal soldiers defending the silicon island chain.
Have some vinegar with your chips
What irks them, though, is the feeling that America is upsetting one of the last remaining bastions of globalisation not just for geopolitical reasons, but out of a selfish desire to preserve its economic dominance. One Japanese executive fumes that America is “childish” to try to stifle Chinese competition. A Taiwanese expert asks drily whether it would satisfy the “America First” contingent if tsmc simply changed its name to America Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Quietly, many hope their firms will continue to straddle the geopolitical divide for years to come. ■
Business | Flyover country
Japanese businesses are trapped between America and China
Could geopolitics kill off an incipient corporate revival?
photograph: reuters
May 28th 2024|tokyo
Not since the 1980s have Japanese businesses generated so much excitement. Japanese companies’ profit margins have doubled in the past decade or so. They are forking out twice as much to their owners in the form of dividends and share buy-backs as they did ten years ago. Shareholder-friendly changes to corporate governance in Japan have caused foreign investors to flock to the country once again. Having languished for decades, the Nikkei 225 index, which tracks the value of the country’s largest listed firms, is up by 25% over the past year (see chart 1). In February it at last exceeded the record it set in 1989, just before Japan’s bubble burst.
chart: the economist
Much of this success reflects Japan Inc’s transformation over the past 35 years. Faced with economic torpor at home, brought on by the stockmarket crash and an ageing population, the country’s industrial giants have spent the past few decades hunting for growth abroad. In 1996 revenue booked by the foreign subsidiaries of Japanese manufacturers was just 7% of their total sales. Last year that figure reached 29%, a record high.
Two markets have been central to this wave of global expansion: America and China. America has long been the largest destination for Japan’s manufacturers. In recent years China has made up a growing share of business. All told, more than half of all sales made by Japanese firms’ foreign subsidiaries comes from one or the other of the two superpowers. Japanese executives therefore understandably view the intensifying Sino-American rivalry with trepidation. Being forced to choose between the two superpowers may, they fear, imperil corporate Japan’s revival.
Some companies appear ready to side with America. A few are shifting manufacturing out of China, often to South-East Asia, in an effort to diversify their supply chains and placate customers worried about geopolitical risks. In September Mitsubishi Motors announced that it would stop making cars in China. It has been expanding production in Thailand and Indonesia instead.
chart: the economist
Many are doing the same in America itself. Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, and Panasonic, an electronics firm, are among the companies that already receive more than $1bn apiece in handouts courtesy of state and federal efforts to revive American manufacturing since 2021, according to Good Jobs First, a subsidy watchdog. Rahm Emanuel, America’s ambassador in Tokyo, has been busily courting Japanese investment. American governors regularly visit Japan, in the hope of attracting money and creating jobs in their states. In return for an $8bn investment by Toyota in battery production in North Carolina, the state has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in tax and infrastructure incentives. America’s comparatively strong economic growth is adding to its attraction as an investment destination for Japanese firms. Sales of their subsidiaries in America have surged in the past two years, helped by the strong dollar (see chart 2).
Yet Japanese bosses also grumble about the domestic-content requirements and restrictions on their investments in China that come with some American subsidies. And they fear America’s increasingly volatile politics. The phrase moshi tora, Japanese for “if Trump”, frequently crops up in boardrooms. Many worry that, if re-elected in November, America’s former president could dismantle the current subsidy regime, or alter it to give preference to American firms. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s opposition to the acquisition of us Steel by Nippon Steel, a Japanese rival, has shown that protectionism is ascendant on both sides of the political aisle. America is becoming “selfish”, grumbles a Japanese semiconductor executive.
chart: the economist
Mistrust of America is one reason why few Japanese firms are prepared to cut ties with China in the way that Mitsubishi Motors has. Even those that reduce their Chinese manufacturing often remain reliant on suppliers across the Sea of Japan. And for many, the Chinese market remains too lucrative to forsake. In April Toyota and Nissan respectively teamed up with Tencent and Baidu, two Chinese digital giants, in an effort to boost the popularity of their cars among technology-mad Chinese motorists. In the past two years annual trade between Japan and China was roughly a third higher than in the late 2010s (see chart 3). “Japan cannot afford to live without China,” says a board member of one large Japanese company.
A big problem for Japanese companies intent on staying in China is that China seems increasingly able to live without Japan. In many industries Chinese competitors are giving Japanese rivals a run for their money. A chemicals-industry executive in Tokyo complains that Chinese rivals have gained an advantage by procuring cheap energy and materials from Russia, which is out of bounds for Japanese companies owing to Ukraine-related sanctions. But low cost is not Chinese industry’s only selling point. Many are offering increasingly sophisticated products, especially in areas once dominated by Japan, such as industrial automation, batteries, carmaking and electronics.
Chinese cars, especially electric ones, have been edging out Japanese vehicles both in China and in other Asian markets. catl, a Chinese battery behemoth, has out-innovated Japanese rivals such as Panasonic. In February Junta Tsujinaga, chief executive of Omron, a Japanese maker of industrial robots, lamented that his firm was facing greater competition from Chinese challengers. It is cutting 2,000 jobs from its global workforce this year.
Japan’s cutting-edge semiconductor firms may be next. As America tightens restrictions on sales of advanced technologies to its geopolitical rival, the Chinese government is trying to reduce its reliance on foreign providers of such things as chips, as well as the materials and tools used to make them. According to Bernstein, a broker, the domestic market share of Chinese makers of equipment used in chip manufacturing rose from 4% in 2019 to an estimated 14% last year. This is a concern for Japanese chip-industry champions such as Tokyo Electron, a manufacturer of equipment to process silicon wafers and Japan’s fourth-most-valuable company, which generates almost half its total sales in China. Such worries will be compounded if, as seems all too likely, American sanctions are extended to the older technologies which Japanese firms are still selling to Chinese buyers.
To navigate the minefield of great-power rivalry, a growing number of Japanese firms are war-gaming how politics could disrupt their businesses. “Economic security” is the latest buzzword. A survey of large Japanese companies by the Institute of Geoeconomics, a think-tank in Tokyo, found that 38% had established economic-security departments. The divisions, which often report directly to a board member, monitor political risks to the company’s operations and supply chains. Many large companies that are particularly exposed to geopolitical winds receive money from Japan’s government to support such efforts.
Knowing where they stand can be a source of solace for Japanese firms. Another is improving relations across East Asia’s wealthy democracies. Governments and businesses in South Korea and Taiwan face similar challenges in maintaining crucial economic relationships with both America and China.
In an interview with Nikkei, a Japanese newspaper, on May 23rd Chey Tae-won, chairman of sk Group, a South Korean conglomerate with a leading memory-chip business, said that his company would expand tie-ups with Japanese semiconductor firms. tsmc, a Taiwanese giant that is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced microprocessors, opened its first factory in Japan in February, and has announced plans to build a second.
Domestic bliss
An increasingly unpredictable outside world is also leading some Japanese companies to retreat to the comfort of home. It helps that, while manufacturing wages have surged in China, Japan’s sluggish growth has made repatriating production relatively less expensive than it once was. The government has also granted modest subsidies to hundreds of companies in industries deemed sensitive, including aircraft parts, medical devices and rare-earth minerals (which are used in electronics). Last year Panasonic announced it would shift some production of air-conditioners from China to Japan. Such moves may calm Japan Inc’s nerves. But if this foreshadows a less globalised future, they may also stall its comeback. ■
Finance and economics | Buttonwood
When to sell your stocks
Poker provides investors with helpful guidance
photograph: satoshi kambayashi
May 30th 2024
Watch professionals play poker, and one of the first things to strike you is how often they fold when the game has barely begun. Rounds of Texas Hold’em, a popular variant, start with each player being dealt two cards and then deciding whether to bet on them. Amateurs are more likely to proceed than not, while pros fold immediately up to 85% of the time. Naturally this does not mean that high-stakes casinos are frequented by the timid. It is simply that most hands are too likely to lose to be worth betting on, and the pros are better at judging when this is the case.
Investors usually dislike gambling comparisons. Yet at a recent conference held by Norges Bank Investment Management, which oversees Norway’s oil fund of $1.6trn, a packed hall sought to learn from a former poker pro. Annie Duke was there to talk about quitting decisions, a topic on which she wrote the book (“Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away”). Ms Duke argued that many factors stack the deck against people considering quitting, pushing them to act irrationally. That applies to poker players wondering whether or not to fold—and also to investors considering whether to exit a position.
Selling out of a position is much harder to do well than buying into it. To see why, start with some now-famous biases popularised by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two giants of behavioural science on whose work Ms Duke draws. People hate losses a lot more than they enjoy equivalent gains (“loss aversion”) but reserve a special loathing for crystallising a certain loss, even if the probable alternative is a greater one (“sure-loss aversion”). They also value things they own more than identical things they do not (the “endowment effect”). All this makes closing a losing position an absolute wrench. Already smarting from a paper loss, you must turn it into a certain one, while also letting go of an asset you value more than you would any equivalent alternative.
Small wonder retail traders are bad at this. Alex Imas of the University of Chicago has studied the behaviour of those who set take-gain and stop-loss orders when they enter a trade. Although these are supposed to neuter harmful biases by exiting the position if a specified profit or loss is reached, Mr Imas found that few investors reached their take-gain orders, having already sold manually rather than risk their profits disappearing. Meanwhile, they tended to cancel and blow through their stop-losses, preferring to keep gambling rather than take a certain hit.
Are the pros any better? Only up to a point. Last year Mr Imas and colleagues published a paper on the buying and selling choices of 783 institutional portfolios with an average value of $573m. Their managers were good at buying: the average purchase, a year later, had beaten the broader market by 1.2 percentage points. But they would have been better off throwing darts at the wall to select which positions to exit. After a year, sales led to an average of 0.8 percentage points of forgone profit compared with a counterfactual in which the fund selected a random asset to sell instead.
Unlike retail traders, the pros were not clinging on to losers. Yet neither were they making selling decisions analogously to how they make buying ones: by choosing the asset adding the least to their risk-adjusted return and offloading it. Instead they used a simpler heuristic, disproportionately selecting positions where relative performance had been very bad or good, and exiting those. As a result, they were throwing away two-thirds of the excess returns their skilful buying had won them.
Ms Duke’s prescriptions for these problems are at once obvious and underused. Most important, recognise that buying and selling are two sides of the same coin and start treating them as such. Many investors keep watch lists of assets they may buy; they should also track those they have sold to test their decision-making. Fund managers routinely justify purchases to an investment committee in advance; they should have to do the same for exits. Traders of all stripes must set strict “kill criteria”, such as stop-losses, and actually stick to them (though even Ms Duke admits to having outstayed hers at the poker table).
Professionals face constraints that prevent them from selling perfectly. Timing may not be in their gift: the capital could be needed for another purchase, or to return to investors. But if the faces in Oslo were anything to go by, many will now be giving their exit strategies a good deal more thought. ■
Finance and economics | Free exchange
Why any estimate of the cost of climate change will be flawed
Temperature fluctuations are unpredictable. Humans are even more so
photograph: álvaro bernis
May 30th 2024
When william nordhaus, who would later win a Nobel prize in economics, modelled the interaction between the economy and the atmosphere he represented the “damage function”—an estimate of harm done by an extra unit of warming—as a wiggly line. So little was known about the costs of climate change that he called it “terra incognita”, unknown land, compared with the “terra infirma”, shaky ground, of the costs of preventing it. Eventually, a rough calculation gave him an estimate that 1-2% of global gdp would be lost from a 3°C rise in temperature. This was no more than an “informed hunch”, he wrote in 1991.
A new working paper puts the damage far higher. Diego Känzig of Northwestern University and Adrien Bilal of Harvard University use past changes in temperatures caused by volcanic eruptions, as well as El Niño, a years-long increase in heat released by the Pacific Ocean, to model the impact of a warmer planet. Employing long-term data on global economic growth and average annual temperature, they find that an additional 1°C of warming will lead to a 12% fall in gdp. A climate-change scenario with more than 3°C of warming would be, according to their estimates, an equivalent blow to fighting a permanent war.
The damage function is one of the inputs to modelling the “social cost of carbon”, a measure policymakers use to gauge whether investments to reduce climate change are worthwhile. Different methodologies produce wildly different answers. In 2022 America’s Environmental Protection Agency (epa) proposed revising up its estimate of the social cost of carbon from $51 to $190. Messrs Känzig’s and Bilal’s calculations produce a figure more than five times higher, at $1,056 a tonne of carbon-dioxide equivalent. Thus they calculate that it would be worthwhile for America to pursue radical decarbonisation even if no other country joined in.
For all the advances in technical capabilities since 1991, the process of removing the damage function’s wiggles is still a tough one. Economists ideally would observe two identical planets: one warming, the other not. In the absence of another Earth, they must instead find terrestrial counterfactuals. An early approach was to compare hotter countries with colder ones to see how incomes differed. This left some things out, however. Norway is not only richer than Nigeria because of its temperature, and no set of “controls” in a statistical analysis can account for all the differences.
One “top down” strategy preferred today follows a sample of regions over time. This is better, but has its own problems. Both temperature and economic growth are, in the jargon, “non-stationary” and “autocorrelated”. Imagine a drunk walking home. He heads in the right direction but missteps at random, sometimes going too far left and sometimes too far right. At any point, his position will depend not only on the direction in which he is heading but on all such stumbles. Economic growth and temperature are similar: they head in the same direction (up), but in any year their level will depend on past deviations. Trying to find a relationship between the two will almost inevitably lead to a spurious result.
The solution is to look at “temperature shocks”, observing how these correlate with income shocks. The extent to which areas grow more slowly after a hot spell indicates the potential damage from climate change. Using short-term variations in temperature, however, introduces a new problem: adaptation. Farmers would not stop growing wheat and start growing bananas in response to a year of warmth, but they might in response to several decades of it. Using data from small areas also misses the global nature of climate change. If one county faces a drought, it can buy food from elsewhere. If the world as a whole loses farmland, it cannot.
Messrs Känzig and Bilal use the whole world as their panel. Although this approach solves the small-area problem, it also suffers from new ones. Historical variation in global temperature, such as that caused by El Niño, has typically been small—more like a tenth of a degree of warming, rather than the two or three that climate change will probably bring. Using data for the whole planet also cuts the number of observations. The sample used by Messrs Känzig and Bilal starts only in 1960. El Niño has coincided with economic shocks, including the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. Having fewer observations makes it harder to control for such factors, meaning the model may overstate the fall in gdp from climate change.
There is another, “bottom up” approach, employed by the epa, which uses several different indicators of the damage done from a higher temperature, rather than solely its impact on economic growth. One of the models estimates changes in agricultural yields and mortality, as well as sea-level rises and additional energy demand for cooling. These estimates are then aggregated into a single dollar amount. But the list of the costs of climate change is not exhaustive. Nor can it account for the sum total of the global effects, such as interrupted trade, that a “top down” estimate could at least in theory capture.
Here be dragons
The range of difficulties is telling. Earth’s climate is a complex system, in which even basic facts, such as the extra warming produced by a tonne of greenhouse gas, are uncertain. There could be tipping points when global warming suddenly accelerates. On top of this, humans are even more complex. Adaptation to a warming planet, perhaps via migration or cooling technology, could dramatically reduce the damage. Humanity has managed to carve out a living, of sorts, in both Alaska and the Amazon rainforest.
So expect the costs of carbon to stay uncertain. Yet they are no longer quite the terra incognita Mr Nordhaus described. Despite their flaws, the methods agree on one thing: climate change carries far heavier costs than Mr Nordhaus first imagined. ■
Culture | Literary afterlives
A century after his death Franz Kafka is still in the zeitgeist
From TikTok to TV to new tomes, the author continues to inspire writers and readers
Kafka, looming largephotograph: alamy
May 30th 2024|new york
Franz kafka was not a social person: he spent much of his time alone, trying, and often failing, to write. But on social media he is a hit. #Kafka posts on TikTok have been viewed around 2bn times. Users—particularly young women—swoon over his soulful letters to Milena, his on-again, off-again paramour. Kafka is “the og lover boy”, reads a caption, below a video of a girl with a t-shirt that says “Reading is sexy”. Other posts dissect his toxic relationship with his father, immortalised in a letter, never delivered, in which Kafka blamed him for being emotionally abusive.
A century after his death on June 3rd 1924, Kafka still has allure, and not just among social-media addicts. A crop of new books pays tribute to him, from fresh translations to even a management book on “Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership”. The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford—home to many of the writer’s manuscripts since 1961, when an aristocratic don drove them there from Zurich—is mounting a special exhibition, “Kafka: Making of an Icon”. A suitably weird biographical series will appear on ChaiFlicks, a Jewish streaming service, in June.
Kafka’s literary immortality would probably be a surprise to him—and a betrayal. He was not famous when he succumbed, age 40, to tuberculosis, two years after retiring from his job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. He had no wife or heirs; in his will he instructed his friend, the author Max Brod, to burn his unpublished writings. Luckily Brod did not oblige. Instead he worked hard to build Kafka’s legacy. It is thanks to him that Kafka has become a household (and schoolroom) name, with people continuing to be drawn to the absurdity of his fiction, including “The Metamorphosis”, in which a salesman has the bad luck to wake up one morning as a big insect.
He has even spawned a vocabulary to talk about the world: “Kafkaesque”, first coined in the late 1930s, has become a label for nightmarish, complex and illogical situations, from government investigations to customer-service lines to nowhere. Covid restrictions in many countries—from quarantines to rapidly changing travel bans—made many think of Kafka, too.
Why does a sickly Austro-Hungarian Jew from Prague with father and commitment issues loom so large over modern culture? Kafka’s status is due, in part, to his prescient portrayal of one of the defining experiences of modern life: the co-existence of rationality and absurdity. The best-drawn example is “The Trial”, a fragmentary novel published a year after Kafka’s death, about a man prosecuted by a mysterious authority for an unknown crime. Readers, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, have read the tale as foreshadowing totalitarianism. “The Castle” (1926) recounts the experience of a land surveyor who arrives in a village and tries and fails to be recognised by the authorities who govern it from a mysterious castle.
But Kafka’s fame is not only the product of literary excellence and relevant themes. He also got lucky, as Karolina Watroba, an Oxford academic, argues in “Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka”, a new biography of his afterlife that traces the author’s reception worldwide. Kafka wrote in widely spoken German, rather than provincial Czech; he benefited from an entrepreneurial literary executor in Brod, who assembled fragments and edited his texts for publication. It does not hurt that his name, which means “jackdaw” (a type of bird) in Czech, is easy to remember and fun to pronounce.
His fluid identity has also allowed him to be a part of many literary traditions without being confined to any of them. He was born in “a decaying, impotent empire” in the form of Austria-Hungary, “which would disappear from the map during his lifetime”, Ms Watroba writes. He cannot comfortably be called Czech, German, or Austrian, yet he is celebrated by all three cultures. Though Kafka never wrote an explicitly Jewish character, Jews have claimed him, and some of his papers are preserved in Jerusalem. At the same time, his depiction of oppressive bureaucracy and senseless violence has moved many, including Israeli and Palestinian authors critical of Zionism, such as Mahmoud Darwish. One of Kafka’s greatest literary achievements is his ability to metamorphose, depending on his audience.
His clear, memorable stories travel well, too. Unlike the dense fiction of other modernist writers, including James Joyce, Kafka’s work is easy to relate to, even if some of the subtext remains elusive. Beyond the West, where he has been a lodestar for everyone from Gabriel García Márquez to Paul Auster, Kafka has found large audiences in Asia. In South Korea female authors have found inspiration in Kafka for their dissection of gender dynamics, notably in Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian”, which plays with Kafka’s theme of psychological alienation.
Although he was far from an optimist—there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe but “not for us”, he is said to have observed—Kafka’s future is bright. While other old books gather dust, Ms Watroba writes, “The man from Prague seems to have adapted to the age of the cloud remarkably well.” The Goethe Institute, a German cultural group, has rendered “The Metamorphosis” in virtual reality, so people can see how it feels to wake up as a giant bug; and last year researchers used Chatgpt, an ai tool, to take a stab at completing “The Trial”. The results are better than you might expect. The world is still mirroring Kafka’s imaginings. If only he were here to write about it. ■
Obituary | Fixing a likeness
June Mendoza captured both the famous and the unknown
Britain’s most prolific portrait-painter died on May 15th, aged 99
photograph: the times
May 29th 2024
The moment she set eyes on him, June Mendoza knew he would be ideal. She was busy painting four presidents of the Royal Society of Engineering when his face appeared at the window. A nice face, plump and cheery, with brawny shoulders under a purple t-shirt. He was hard at work too, expertly fixing scaffolding with a twist of the tool that swung cheekily at his groin. When the engineers had left, she went to the window and asked if he would sit for her. He agreed at once.
Her career, as Britain’s most-called-on portrait-painter, was to encompass most of the grandees of the land. The list began with royals: three Prince Philips, two Annes, three Charleses, two Dianas, five queens. She got very good at painting pearls. (The queen’s face, though, was not easy, soft rather than sharp.) After these came archbishops, generals, prime ministers, eminent musicians, famous sports personalities, captains of industry and entertainers. But generously mixed in with these—perhaps a third of her productions—were her “pick-ups”. She spotted them across restaurants, at the theatre, in shops, and would boldly ask if she could paint them. All were surprised, but almost all went along with the novel experience of watching this small, slim woman darting back and forth from her unwieldy old easel, chatting.
Her gift for catching likenesses was nothing she had learned. It was something you were born with, like perfect pitch. Her upbringing, with touring theatrical musicians in Australia, spurred her to watch performers and record them on paper. She would sit backstage with her drawing book, solitary but deeply happy. At school, she drew her classmates. At 12 she asked Sir Malcolm Sargent, then a doyen among conductors, whether she could draw him (he said yes). Two years later, still in plaits and her school uniform, she went to life classes, naked men and all; it didn’t bother her. In short, her childhood already revolved round portraits.
Her professional sessions, though, often had to be done at breakneck speed, especially with the royals (so busy, poor dears!). They might last merely an hour, scattered over several weeks. On first meeting she would set the rules, because no matter how grand her subject, here she was the boss. Even at Buckingham Palace she was free to choose the chairs, the background and the clothes, too, unless uniform was required. Fancy outfits, on men or women, were turned down; she wanted to do her subjects as they were, rather than pretending to be something else. At the start, most sat carefully. It was in breaks, when they dropped the pose, that she could think, “That’s it!” and pounce with her brush.
Yet portraiture was not just about faces. Body language was almost more important. She needed to observe, straight away, the shape people made as they stood or sat: the tilt of their shoulders, how they held their heads. (John Major’s shape was a diagonal, Ann Widdecombe’s a plump curve; Chris Evert’s, off the court, a tall thin rectangle.) That gave her a frame for the rest. She once had to paint eight members of an academic committee who, at first, stood meekly in a row in their suits. When she asked them to sit, though, each sat differently. Together they made the design she needed, delightfully irregular.
After shape came colour, almost always oils for richness. (She hated working from photographs, a gauze between her and her subjects. She wanted their energy, and the paint, to show.) Around 17 colours made up her palette; one was flesh tone, used only as a base. When this baffled people, she asked them to look at the palms of their hands. They seemed pink, but she also saw Naples yellow, olive green, oranges and mauves. Some sitters, when she encouraged them to inspect the work in progress, were alarmed to find their noses blue. It would all make sense in time.
Her formal artistic training had been spells at two art colleges, where she took nothing in. When she moved to London in her 20s, perching like many Australians in Earl’s Court with a single gas ring and no bus fare, she used her paintings as barter: once for cough syrup, once for a fur coat. Her first paid job was drawing the “Belle of the Ballet” strip for Girl magazine for five years. But meanwhile her reputation as a painter grew steadily. She worked like mad, through bringing up four children to well into old age, driving miles from south London to wherever her subjects might be, lugging her easel up and down stairs, intrepid as ever.
As she painted, she made many friends. The intimate situation encouraged chat. But there were also long comfortable silences, the sort you would not get in ordinary socialising. Both she and the sitter were working hard then. The only person she could not connect with was Margaret Thatcher, who controlled herself so rigidly that she reported nothing there. A portrait emerged, but not one she was particularly pleased with.
In fact, she was never totally happy with any of them. There was always a flaw. She was painfully aware that a beautiful painting could be a poor likeness, and vice versa. A good likeness had to catch alertness, dynamism—life, in short—and please the sitter. A good painting, in colour and composition and technique, had to satisfy and even move viewers who had no idea who the sitter was. That perfect balance was partly why she kept returning to the “ordinary” people who caught her eye. Perhaps, too, she was after the soul? No, that was much too pompous. She had enough tricky criteria to think about, without that.
What she undoubtedly glimpsed on the fly were great faces to draw. And thus her lovely scaffolder Chris McCann, “tubular structural engineer”, found himself hanging in a gallery in Girton College Cambridge, radiating pride and affability from his high perch, all his own work. His portrait hung alongside those, by other artists, of a coracle-maker, a fish-delivery man, a vagrant, a milk-tester and a wheeler-dealer. To June Mendoza, he might justifiably have hung beside the queen. ■
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