The Economist Articles for July 4th week : July. 27th(Interpretation)

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The Economist Articles for July 4th week : July. 27th(Interpretation)

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Leaders | A slow-burn success

The world is winning the war on cancer

Progress has been remarkable. Death rates are down substantially, and are likely to fall further

Jul 17th 2025|5 min read

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IN 1971 RICHARD NIXON, then America’s president, announced a “war on cancer”. Just two years earlier the Apollo programme had combined big science and big government to put astronauts on the Moon, so hopes were high. Some optimistic doctors talked of a cure for cancer within a few years.

They were wrong. Today every adult has had cancer, knows someone who has, or both. Half of men and a third of women in rich countries can expect to suffer from it at some point in their lives. In America, where it is the second-most-common cause of death, just behind heart disease, it kills around 600,000 people a year. Worldwide, it is responsible for about one in six of all deaths. If your criterion for success was a cure within a decade—or even two or three or four—then you might conclude that the war on cancer has been lost.

In fact, things are better than many realise. The progress is plain from the data and there is every reason to think it will continue. Cancer is related to age. If you strip out longer lifespans, it becomes clear that in the rich world the early 1990s were an inflection point. Since then, the age-adjusted death rate has been falling, slowly but steadily, year after year. In America the rate is now about a third lower than in the 1990s. The trend is similar in other developed countries.

What some scientists hoped would be a blitzkrieg has turned out to be a steady but successful war of attrition. Some victories have been spectacular. Childhood leukaemia used to be virtually a death sentence; now it has a five-year survival rate above 90%. Yet because cancer is not one illness, but a whole category, much of the progress has come not from big breakthroughs, but thousands of smaller advances in screening, surgery and drugs.

Future gains will come from three main sources. Some will come by applying lessons from the rich world all across the globe. The overlooked success story in the fight against cancer has been prevention—perhaps because cancers that never happen are less visible than those that are cured. For example, smoking rates have plummeted in rich countries. That has probably prevented more than 3m cancer deaths since 1975 in America alone. Because smoking still causes one in five cancer deaths around the world, anti-tobacco drives in poor and middle-income countries, where smoking remains common, stand to do an enormous amount of good.

Illustration: Daniel Lievano

Another source of progress will be cheaper medicines and extra wealth to pay for them. Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers in women. Almost all cases are the delayed side-effect of infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV), a bug. In 2008 Britain began offering a newly developed HPV vaccine to teenage girls. A decade and a half later, rates of cervical cancer among women in their 20s are down by 90%, and British health officials talk of virtually eradicating cervical cancer by 2040. The original HPV vaccine was relatively expensive. But a cheaper version developed in India now underpins a mass-vaccination campaign in that country, too.

And the last source of progress will be the clinical application of fresh science. This comes in two steps: identifying who is most at risk of developing a cancer, and then finding ways to stop the disease in its tracks. As we report this week, both hold promise.

Scientists already know of genetic variants that predispose their carriers to certain kinds of cancer, such as a faulty BRCA-1 gene that raises the risk of breast or prostate cancer. However, less than half of all cancer patients have a known risk factor. Similarly, only some pre-cancerous cells turn malignant. For example, bowel cancers tend to emerge from polyps, but only 5-10% of polyps become cancerous.

The aim is to untangle this confusion in order to identify patients very early, when treatment is most effective. That work draws on huge biobanks of tissue samples and on the ability to watch genes switch on and off in living cells—impossible even a decade ago. Armed with new biomarkers in blood or breath and a deeper understanding of how combinations of genes and environmental exposure predispose people to develop cancers, physicians can target those who would benefit from treatment. That is important to prevent people undergoing needless surgery, chemo- and radiation therapy, at vast expense and with severe side-effects.

Having worked out whom to treat, doctors can make use of an expanding arsenal of therapies. Some cheap drugs seem to act as cancer prophylactics. Aspirin, a painkiller, seems to cut the risk of bowel cancer in half when given to those with Lynch syndrome, a genetic disorder that predisposes sufferers to some types of cancer. Metformin, a cheap diabetes drug, cuts the risk of recurrence in women who have been treated for a particular type of breast cancer. GLP-1 receptor agonists such as Ozempic show promise, too.

Alongside the mainstays of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy a new technique is emerging that harnesses the power of the immune system. The idea is to boost the body’s own ability to attack cancerous cells. Some vaccines—perhaps genetically tailored to individual patients—can target a cancer that is already established. Others, acting more like broad vaccines used against diseases such as the flu, could target pre-cancerous cells. Vaccines of this sort for breast and colon cancer are in clinical trials.

Bucking onco

Good news often goes unreported, especially if it happens gradually. That is the story of the war on cancer. Not everything is perfect: treatments are costly, drug firms worry about being sued for side-effects when treating people for diseases they do not yet have, and the Trump administration is planning steep cuts to the National Cancer Institute—setting back the science and putting off a generation of researchers. But costs will fall, treatments will find their way to market and work goes on in Europe and China, which this year overtook America as the main source of cancer research. That is why the age-adjusted death rate will continue falling, year after year. ■

Leaders | A tragedy of the digital commons

To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model

Artificial intelligence has undermined the internet’s central bargain

Illustration: Nick Little

Jul 17th 2025|4 min read

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This week Hollywood released details of a new film about Sam Altman and the rise of OpenAI, whose launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has brought high drama to the tech world. One of the most important effects of artificial intelligence (AI) so far is surely on how information is spread online. Instead of typing their questions into search engines, people increasingly pose them to chatbots. Google, which a year ago started adding AI-generated summaries to its results, promises that users can “let Google do the Googling for you”.

This revolution promises to bring more knowledge more quickly to more people. Users are right to embrace it. But there is a sting in the tail. As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.

Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; WebMD, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.

The cost is clear. Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for AI training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its AI services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. AI-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency.

Online innovators are trying out alternatives. Some propose a pay-as-you-crawl system, in which AI bots are charged for reading sites’ content. Others are working on systems that analyse chatbots’ answers to determine where their information came from, so that sources can be compensated. Tech firms resist such ideas: giants don’t want their crawling of the internet to be metered, and startups fear they will be made to pay for training data that pioneers like OpenAI were allowed to grab for nothing. Optimists cite the music industry, where piracy gave way to profitability when streaming platforms invented new ways to charge consumers and compensate artists.

Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, AI companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, OpenAI relies entirely on others for its content.

If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.■

Asia | Banyan

Welcome to Asia’s secret Silicon island

There is more to Singapore’s sister city than a stroll down memory lane

Illustration: Lan Truong

Jul 17th 2025|4 min read

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When Singaporeans want to travel back in time to the city-state’s colonial days, they hop on a flight to Penang. The narrow streets of the Malaysian island’s historic centre are lined with shophouses built by the British. Popular culinary institutions, in business for generations, serve noodles and curries and cater to tourists’ nostalgia. Elderly hawkers sell sweets from their stalls on winding side streets.

Singapore and Penang were once twin cities, built to British plans as free ports in the early 19th century. In Singapore only a few clusters of that history remain. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, razed most of the islands’ slums after it won independence from the British and broke away from Malaysia. In the place of pokey shophouses and the classical architecture of old trading houses came steel and glass skyscrapers and utilitarian concrete public-housing blocks.

Penang, never as big a port as Singapore, took a different path. After the second world war, the British doubted its ability to stand on its own, so they legally bound it to the states of the Malay Peninsula. It stuck with Malaya after independence in 1957, even after the national government stripped it of its free-port status a decade later. As Singapore’s economy rapidly reached escape velocity, Penang’s slowed. Its shophouses (and superior food) remained.

But Penang’s leaders refused to give up. They followed Singapore down one path still available to them, recruiting early semiconductor firms to move labour-intensive operations to South-East Asia. A single Intel facility became a hub of activity. Today, workers in full protective gear walk acres of space-age clean rooms clustered around the island’s airport, where schedules are dominated by flights to other key points of the semiconductor supply chain.

Tourists arriving with the idea of taking selfies in front of quaint old landmarks rarely notice the parts of the island that have made it one of the region’s most important industrial assets. On average, it attracts a third of the country’s foreign direct investment and produces a third of Malaysia’s exports, at $117bn in 2024. That is despite the fact that Penang does not make the highest-end chips manufactured by the likes of Taiwan’s TSMC, or even many of the older generation of chips. Rather, Penang’s niche is cutting wafers made elsewhere into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces, before putting them together to form an integrated circuit. Only China and Taiwan do more of this sort of business.

As the chip war between America and China heats up and global demand for chips soars, Penang is poised to get rich. The state government is planning to double the area dedicated to semiconductors by reclaiming land, shipping in more electricity from the mainland and freeing up water supplies for the hot, thirsty compounds. American firms are pledging over $8bn in new investment in Penang, while their Chinese suppliers are moving manufacturing to the island to ensure that they can continue selling to them.

Penang faces two big challenges if it is to continue to succeed. The first is a brain drain. Keeping engineers and skilled labourers in Penang has long proved a challenge. Singapore, not far away, pays better and boasts better infrastructure. A bigger problem is the national government’s long-standing affirmative-action policies favouring the Malay majority on matters from university admissions to the selection of civil servants. At independence Penang’s population was 57% ethnic Chinese; now it is 44%. Anwar Ibrahim, the prime minister and a native of the state, campaigned against these quotas in opposition. But now he says they will not change any time soon.

The national government has been unhelpful in other ways, too. For political reasons, it wants to push part of the country’s chips business farther down the peninsula, diluting the cluster around Penang. Worse, its big idea is to buy its way up the semiconductor value chain. In March the economy minister inked a $250m deal with Arm Holdings, a British firm, to get access to its most advanced chip designs. The minister will decide which firms get to work with them. Malaysian politics runs on brazen patronage, so it is difficult to see these decisions being made well.

Even so, Penang’s business leaders are bullish. Their success has always come in spite of the national government’s plans, not because of them. ■

China | Sexism in universities

Why a fling with a foreigner insults China’s “national dignity”

Outrage mounts over a tryst between a Chinese student and a Ukrainian gamer

A very busy playerPhotograph: Getty Images

Jul 17th 2025|2 min read

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LIKE HIS Greek namesake, Danylo Teslenko, formerly a professional gamer known online as “Zeus”, presents himself as a ladies’ man. On a trip to China in December the Ukrainian had a tryst with a female student and, without permission, shared intimate, though not sexual, videos of her online in a fan group (one clip showed her sleeping). But it is she who has faced a storm over their encounter.

On July 8th Dalian Polytechnic University identified her in a public notice of expulsion. The institution says that “engaging in improper relations with foreigners” and “damaging national dignity” are prohibited under its student code. Related hashtags—including some which explicitly mention the woman by name—have been read more than 660m times in recent days as national media outlets helped spread the story throughout the country. “She may be alive but she’s been handed a social death sentence,” concludes one online commenter.

The decision has unleashed a torrent of misogyny and nationalist fervour among Chinese netizens. Online mobs have hounded the student, castigating her for “throwing herself” at a foreign man. In response Mr Teslenko apologised to the student and wrote of his “deep respect for China and Chinese culture”. But he then fanned rumours by claiming that there was just one problem with what had occurred between them. “The only unfortunate thing is that the girl never mentioned she had a boyfriend. I believe if it weren’t for that detail, nothing bad would’ve happened,” he declared.

Indignation at the nationalists’ outrage is also widespread in China. Many point out that male students get off much more lightly for actual grievous behaviour. One at Guilin University of Electronic Technology, identified solely by his surname, was merely put on probation for filming up women’s skirts in 2022. Then in 2023 another, who also remained anonymous after being accused of sexually harassing a woman in a library at Wuhan University, was penalised only academically.

In China universities have the right to manage students’ behaviour through rules around conduct. Where Dalian Polytechnic touched a particular nerve was by connecting a tryst with a foreigner with old-fashioned questions of “national dignity”. The move is legally contentious. And universities make odd moral arbiters of the private lives of their students—especially given the preval‎ence of sexist double standards within them. Concern is growing that other institutions could make use of ambiguous codes to copy Dalian Polytechnic’s example. “Using ‘national dignity’ to hijack a 20-something-year-old just goes to show how hypocritical this school is,” despairs one critic online. ■

United States | Lexington

Why Superman is the least relevant superhero

And why that is his greatest strength

Illustration: David Simonds

Jul 17th 2025|5 min read

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Hollering for help, Lois Lane dangles overhead from a helicopter that has crashed atop a skyscraper. On the sidewalk below Clark Kent, briefcase in hand, squeezes through a panicked crowd, searching for a place to transform into the hero of “Superman: The Movie”, which came out in 1978. He pauses to size up a public payphone, but the booths that served him well in the comic books of the 1940s have themselves transformed, into transparent boxes on pedestals. In a gesture of gentle Kentian consternation, he purses his lips, then moves on. It’s a sly visual joke, in keeping with the buoyant spirit of the film: the world was changing, but he could not—at least, not easily. In retrospect, it prophesied Superman’s predicament in the 21st century, in the existential battle every comic-book hero must wage, the one for cultural relevance.

The payphone has all but vanished now, while the humble telephone has undergone a classic comic-book-hero’s journey and acquired awesome new powers. Trust has collapsed in the institutions Superman used to defend. Mr Kent’s chosen profession, it must be admitted, is not what it was. (The 1978 film dates itself by opening with a paean to a “symbol of hope”—not Superman but the Daily Planet, with its “reputation for clarity and truth”.) As facts have become more contested and the world ever more complicated, Americans have resorted to a simple means to sort the good guys from the bad guys. And for Superman, political polarisation, more than any mineral, is kryptonite, a challenge to the idealism that is his core proposition.

Mere cynicism is an enemy he has always defeated. The 1978 film, which starred Christopher Reeve, was a tonic for Americans discontented by Watergate and Vietnam. When Superman grants his first interview, he tells Lois Lane, played by Margot Kidder, that he has come “to fight for truth and justice and the American way”. His spell over her snaps, and she guffaws: “You’re going to end up fighting every elected official in this country!” But the mockery itself implies she believes in an “American way” that transcends politics, and Superman rightly judges she is striking a pose: “I’m sure you don’t really mean that, Lois,” he replies mildly.

That movie, a blockbuster, touched off the boom in comic-book cinema that continues to this day. Yet, though faster than a speeding bullet, Superman, with his sincerity and godlike power, has had more trouble than other superheroes keeping up with the fashions for irony and anti-heroes. The X-Men were easily cast as spiky misfits with authority problems, as were most members of the Marvel crowd, led by Ironman, with his bad-boy ways and wisecrackery. Batman’s tragic back story, human frailty and creepy eponym suited him for exploring the dark dimensions of superhero vigilantism. But characters with powers as vast as Superman have tended to become studies in how power corrupts, as in two Amazon series, “The Boys” and “Invincible”.

When the director Zack Snyder brought Superman back to the big screen in 2013 in “The Man of Steel”, he was burdened by his power and the fear it sows. He wore his blue bodysuit, duly darkened, like a hair shirt. That film tried to sidestep terrestrial politics by pitting its suffering Superman against invading Kryptonians, allying him with all humanity, not any particular government. That was a political statement in itself. “You’re scared of me because you can’t control me,” Superman tells an American general. “But that doesn’t mean I’m your enemy.” It did not necessarily make him an ally, either. That is why, in Mr Snyder’s next instalment, “Batman v Superman”, Batman tries to kill him.

The latest effort to imagine Superman came under attack from American culture warriors as it landed in theatres on July 11th. The director, James Gunn, had observed in an interview that Superman was an immigrant, and he said he wanted to tell a story of “basic human kindness”. Possibly overlooking that the First Lady is an immigrant, and that surrendering “kindness” may not be politically wise, some on the right attacked the movie as “woke” before they even saw it.

But “Superman” drew enthusiastic fans in its first weekend, leading at the box office, and it is doubtful they were reacting to a partisan theme. Mr Gunn, probably best known for his three “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, takes chances with being glib but not polemical. In his movies he gestures at politics for the same reasons he does at social media or popular music: to wink at the audience and supply familiar context for his freakish characters. This time, that helps him emphasise how out of synch his hero is, so uncool, as Lois acidly notes, that he thinks a lousy pop band plays punk rock. Rather than run away from Superman’s squareness, this movie recovers the Superman of 1978 and before: unironic, uncynical and optimistic, blind to politics in his commitment to saving lives, whether human, dog or squirrel.

Dreams from his fathers

To the extent the director ventures an argument that touches politics, it is that in a cynical and cutting world, to be kind and sincere is subversive, even cool. Mr Gunn appreciates that among superheroes, Superman is actually the greatest misfit of all. In an echo of their 1978 exchange, Lois mocks him for thinking everyone he meets is trustworthy and beautiful. “Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” he replies mildly. Mr Gunn’s frequent theme, an intergenerational crowd-pleaser, is the relationship between parents and children, and Superman’s origins offer rich terrain. By inserting a wrinkle into the Kryptonian way of parenting, Mr Gunn sharpens the question of whether this alien might have chosen to use his gifts for evil. But the movie is not hinting at menace. Instead, it illuminates what has always been Superman’s most important power: a character sound enough to resist the temptation to abuse his other powers. That is a political lesson for any era. ■

The Americas | Social welfare in Mexico

Mexico’s handouts do a bit for the poor and lots for Morena

The populist party has made unconditional cash transfers central to its rule. That creates weaknesses

Photograph: Axel Javier Sulzbacher/Panos Pictures

Jul 17th 2025|Mexico City|5 min read

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Tania earns a decent wage working as a doctor’s assistant in central Mexico City. But to make ends meet the 47-year-old relies on government handouts. She is paid for keeping her 14-year-old daughter, Regina, enrolled in school. Her 67-year-old mother, Teresa, gets a non-contributory pension. Tens of millions of Mexicans get these transfers. They are the mechanism favoured by Morena, Mexico’s populist ruling party, for curbing the country’s poverty and inequality, the subject of our ongoing series. And they have helped the party accrue extraordinary political power over the past seven years.

Mexico was a pioneer in 1997 when it launched Progresa, later renamed Prospera. The conditional cash-transfer programme gave money to the poorest fifth of households, provided that children went to school and the whole family attended health check-ups. The results were plain. School attendance rose, especially among girls, while people’s health and nutrition improved. The proportion of women who worked increased modestly. The model endured for two decades, through four different administrations, and was copied from Brazil to Indonesia.

It was scrapped in 2019 by Morena’s founder Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then Mexico’s president, who alleged misuse of funds. He replaced it with programmes that are universal and largely unconditional, and which are still running in Mexico today under Mr López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Every Mexican over 65 who lives in the country can claim a pension of 6,200 pesos ($330) every two months. Students at all levels of education are paid to enrol in school. A programme called Sembrando Vida pays people in rural areas to plant trees. Another called Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro gives cash to people aged 18-29 for doing a one-year apprenticeship.

At first glance, the new system does seem to have reduced poverty and inequality. The latter declined slightly between 2020 and 2022, as incomes rose faster among poorer households than richer ones. The share of Mexicans living in poverty as defined by Coneval‎, the country’s spending watchdog, fell from 42% in 2018 to 36% in 2022. The share living in extreme poverty grew from 7% to 7.1% over the same period. Without cash transfers it would have been two or three percentage points higher, says Axel González of México Cómo Vamos, a think-tank.

But most of these reductions came through increasing wages. The portion of household income attributable to wages rose from 64% to 66% between 2020 and 2022. The share accounted for by transfers fell. Morena had a hand in this, too. Mr López Obrador doubled the minimum wage in real terms while in office between 2018 and 2024. Ms Sheinbaum has promised to increase it by 12% every year.

Chart: The Economist

Unless productivity improves, future minimum-wage increases will probably start incentivising the expansion of informal work, as businesses struggle to afford their wage bill. Recent rises have not prompted this as the minimum wage was previously very low. Mexico’s recent history of anaemic annual GDP growth, just 0.8% on average between 2018 and 2024, suggests this is likely. Some 55% of Mexican workers already toil informally. Adding to their numbers will increase the legions of Mexicans with little or no health care. Seguro Popular, a health-care scheme that covered informal workers, was dismantled by Mr López Obrador in 2019.

The lack of health-care coverage is not the only way in which the very poorest are worse off under Morena. Thanks to the new universality of handouts, they also get a smaller share of public resources than they used to. In 2018 the poorest decile of households received 19% of social spending. In 2020 they got 6%. This, combined with reduced access to health care, is probably what caused the small increase in extreme poverty between 2018 and 2022.

The way handouts are managed also appears to have hurt education. Research by Susan Parker of the University of Maryland and colleagues has found that drop-out rates rose after Prospera was scrapped, particularly for boys aged 15-17. That is troubling since the government presents transfers as a way to deter young men from joining criminal gangs.

But there is no doubt about the political expediency of Morena’s programmes. In the presidential race held in 2024, Ms Sheinbaum won more votes in areas where handouts are more widespread. Many voters openly cited government transfers as their reason for backing Morena. Meanwhile, the government has shown little interest in eval‎uating its programmes’ effectiveness. In June it started dismantling Coneval‎, which used to do the job. There are few checks, if any, on whether youths whom the government pays to attend school are actually doing so, or whether those paid to carry out apprenticeships are working informally instead.

The mounting cost of Morena’s handouts is weighing on Mexico. Social programmes now absorb around 12% of the federal budget. Nearly 60% of that pays for the universal pension that is written into the constitution. Its cost is due to rise, as Mexico is ageing fast. Meanwhile, tax revenues are low, and an already-sluggish economy is under constant threat from Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Other public services have been taking a hit to preserve Morena’s goodies. Health care, for example, received less than 1% of the 2025 budget, a third less than it did in 2024. (Pemex, the state’s loss-making oil company, is set to receive 5%.) Schools are suffering, too. Regina says government-supplied textbooks are of such low quality that her teachers refuse to use them. “What is the point of scholarships if people study in bad schools?” asks Teresa, Regina’s grandmother.

Credit-rating agencies note a fiscal deficit being driven wider by transfers. Many forecasters see a recession coming, especially if Mr Trump pushes through tariffs on a wider array of Mexican exports. If Ms Sheinbaum’s government was forced to cut back its handouts, or took the risk of tipping the economy into instability in order to preserve them, Morena’s sky-high support could crumble. Generous handouts may help win elections, but it’s not hard to see how they could become a liability. ■

Middle East & Africa | A fragile overhaul

The dark side of Ethiopia’s liberalisation

The fruits of promising reforms are under threat from waste, graft and conflict

Transition cityPhotograph: AFP

Jul 17th 2025|Addis Ababa|5 min read

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For the past couple of years much of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, was reduced to rubble by demolitions. Now luxury apartments, parks and cycle lanes are rising from the ruins. Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, believes the old city must make way for a cleaner, shinier one.

Mr Abiy is transforming not just Addis, but Ethiopia. Long one of Africa’s most state-controlled economies, the east African country of 135m people has recently begun to liberalise. A year ago it floated its currency, the birr, and entered an IMF programme worth $3.4bn (3% of GDP). A raft of reforms will radically alter its economic system. “What they are trying to do is comparable to the transition economies after the fall of the Soviet Union,” says Stefan Dercon of Oxford University, who has advised several Ethiopian governments on economic policy. Ethiopia hopes to follow the path of countries such as Poland and become an economic power. Yet it may end up looking more like Russia, its transition derailed by corruption, conflict and chaos.

Following decades of communist dictatorship, the government began to allow some space for free markets in the 1990s. But it retained tight restrictions on private enterprise, growing through debt-fuelled state investment in infrastructure. Yet since a sovereign default in 2023, following a devastating civil war, forced Ethiopia to ask the IMF for a bailout, it has opened up banking, retail and other sectors to foreign competition, and relaxed restrictions on repatriating profits. On July 1st parliament approved a law allowing foreigners to own property. The country plans to privatise some state-owned firms. In January it opened a stock exchange.

Economic performance has been encouraging, according to official data. Despite a sharp depreciation of the birr, which has lost more than half its value against the dollar over the past year, Ethiopia’s central bank says it brought annual inflation down to 14.4% in May, compared with 23% the previous year. The fiscal deficit has shrunk to 1.5% of GDP, the IMF reckons, down from 4.2% in 2022. The cheaper birr has boosted exports, particularly of coffee and gold, helping to alleviate dollar shortages. On July 2nd Ethiopia reached a deal with external creditors, including China, to restructure some $3.5bn of debt, 11% of the total. On July 3rd the World Bank agreed to give the country $1bn worth of grants and concessional loans. The IMF estimates that the economy grew by 7.2% in the year to July.

This rosy picture may not be the whole story. The IMF relies on government data for its estimates, but has repeatedly complained about “the quality and availability of economic statistics” in Ethiopia. The World Bank said this month that it could not estimate Ethiopia’s national income for the current fiscal year. It said it needed more time to take the sudden depreciation of the birr into account. Proxy measures such as electricity demand indicate the economy is growing—but probably not as fast as official figures suggest.

Fiscal belt-tightening has resulted in savage cuts to social spending. Food and cash transfers to poor households were slashed by a third last year. Reduced education spending has made it impossible to rebuild the thousands of schools that have been damaged or destroyed by conflict. At least 8m children are thought to be out of school. The country’s doctors, who have seen their salaries fall by roughly two-thirds in real terms over the past six years, launched a month-long, nationwide strike in May. At the same time Mr Abiy has continued to spend what are thought to be billions of dollars on vanity projects, such as an opulent new palace.

The prime minister’s supporters argue that although economic reform is painful, it will attract the foreign investment Ethiopia needs to thrive. Yet in April an initial public offering for Ethiotelecom, the state telecoms firm, managed to sell just 11% of the shares on offer. The IMF said on July 15th that foreign direct investment (FDI) had been “weaker than anticipated” following the reforms. It expects net FDI for the year to July to hit 3.2% of GDP, compared with a peak of more than 5% in 2017.

Investors say that the reforms have so far been skin-deep. A former executive at a multinational company in Ethiopia says state-owned firms still enjoy unfair advantages. Others lament that Ethiopia remains a licence raj. A good rule of thumb, says one investor, is that anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden.

Corruption, which used to be relatively rare, seems to be worsening. In 2023 almost two-thirds of Ethiopians felt it had increased in the past year, according to Afrobarometer, a pollster. Procedures such as applying for a passport have become impossible to complete without paying a bribe. Some complain of having to grease official palms just to pay tax.

Though Mr Abiy has conceded that corruption has become “normalised”, he maintains that it is limited to petty graft. Yet many fear the rot runs deeper. Budgets for government projects are opaque. Contracts are being handed out without competitive tender. There is talk of a new class of oligarchs making fast fortunes thanks to their connections with officials. “In the old days if you were confronted with someone asking for a brown envelope, you would go to someone higher up and they would make the problem go away,” says another investor. “Now the higher up you go, the more you have to pay.”

The most important barrier to investment in Ethiopia remains conflict. The country’s two most populous regions, Oromia and Amhara, have been roiling under insurgencies for years. Tensions with neighbouring Eritrea continue to rise, in large part because Mr Abiy has made no secret of his desire to grab its Red Sea ports. As public services across the country are ailing, he has been equipping his army with fighter jets and drones. Nothing deters investment like a looming war. ■

Europe | Droning on

Ukrainian drones are killing ever more soldiers

Russia is grinding ahead but paying an excruciating price

Every move you makePhotograph: Ed Ram/Guardian/eyevine

Jul 17th 2025|Kostiantynivka|3 min read

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Colonel Yehor Derevyanko is getting impatient. Three Russian soldiers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are being watched, walk down a country road. “Kill them!” he snaps. Two loitering drones are despatched. The bunker beneath the eastern city of Kostiantynivka contains five screens showing drone feeds and three men using laptops. Suddenly one blurts out: “Fuck, we’ve lost them!”

The front line is 12km away. The cities of Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk are the next big targets in the Russians’ bid to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region. In 2023 they took Bakhmut, 26km to the north-east, and in February last year they took Avdiivka, 38km south. The fall of these two towns has seemed inevitable ever since, but Russian progress has been extremely slow. In early June Ukrainian intelligence reported they would be the target of a summer offensive. But Colonel Derevyanko, a commander in the 93rd Brigade, says he sees no preparations for one.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Indeed, he says, Russian soldiers sometimes fake advances. A week ago a Russian flag was lowered by drone on nearby Stupochky, for the fifth time. Russian soldiers falsely claimed they had taken the village. Such reports go up the chain of command, he says, and officers “get medals”.

Two Russian soldiers reappear on screen, then dart for cover under trees. New drones are despatched, and a plume of smoke rises where the men were last seen. The Ukrainians wait for an intelligence unit to confirm‎ the kills. Every day, says Colonel Derevyanko, the Russians probe for weak spots. Small groups of ill-equipped, ill-prepared men are sent on what are usually suicide missions. If they move forward and stay alive, others will follow. The Russians are inching forward, but the cost in lives is extremely high, and rising. If technology a year ago meant that “we could kill 50 Russians,” says Mr Derevyanko, “now it is five times more.”

In Pokrovsk, 45km south-west, the Russians are closer. Neither city is in imminent danger of falling. But Colonel Derevyanko says nowhere in Kostiantynivka is safe: Russian drones can see almost anywhere. Before the full-scale invasion in 2022 some 67,000 civilians lived here. Now only 10-20% of them remain.

Some areas are more dangerous than others. The railway station is off-limits: it is within range of Russian fibre-optic drones. On roads into town tunnels of netting protect drivers. Military vehicles have anti-drone nets or metal fencing. They speed past shelled-out apartment blocks, while old women walk about with shopping bags. Artillery booms in the distance.

Eighteen months ago drones could target anyone 5km from the front line. Now that has extended to 15km. “We control the land” around Kostiantynivka, says Mr Derevyanko, “but the Russians control 90% of the sky.” That cuts both ways, though. On the far side of the front line lies Horlivka, seized by Russian-controlled rebels in 2014. On July 13th Denis Pushilin, the head of the Russian-controlled administration in occupied Donetsk, said 394 Ukrainian drones had been intercepted in Horlivka that week.

In another underground bunker, an engineer who uses the codename Bancomat manages a team of men developing and building drones. A large quadcopter nearing completion will serve as an aerial signal repeater, enabling surveillance drones to fly up to 40km from base. 3D printers hum in the background making parts. Men at workstations solder Chinese chips onto circuit boards. Bancomat’s team are working on AI technology. In the meantime, he says, “we need money!”

In a third bunker, Chief Lieutenant Volodymyr Demchenko commands the Black Raven drone battalion. A year ago it had 100 men; now it has 400. The team have just killed five Russians. “They had just arrived!” he says cheerfully. But drones, Colonel Derevyanko cautions, are not enough. He is happy that Donald Trump will resume sending Ukraine 155mm shells. If they get the weapons, he says, “we can stop them taking these cities.” ■

International | The Telegram

Cynical realism won’t save India from Donald Trump

India has done brilliantly by balancing America, China and Russia. Can that last?

Illustration: Chloe Cushman

Jul 15th 2025|5 min read

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IT IS HARD to knock India’s political and business elites off balance, but President Donald Trump is managing. In Delhi’s book-lined studies and the glass-walled corporate towers of Mumbai, grandees are suffering from vertigo. Normally, Indian diplomats and strategists take pride in being unshockable, remaining coolly transactional whatever a wicked world throws at them. But since Mr Trump’s return to office, elites are off-kilter.

Notably, well-connected Indians describe a mood of uncertainty since a four-day conflict with Pakistan in May. That fight, which saw Indian jets shot down and Pakistan struck by Indian missiles, was triggered by a murderous attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir that India blames on Islamist terrorists sponsored by Pakistan’s security services.

India has often fought Pakistan. This time, what shook elites—long sensitive about outsiders presuming to mediate India’s disputes with its neighbour—was how Mr Trump took credit for the war’s ending. He claimed to have forced India and Pakistan to make peace, by threatening the two countries’ trade ties with America. Worse, Mr Trump bragged that, without him, the conflict could have gone nuclear. The Indian view is that the nuclear arsenals built by India and Pakistan make the costs of escalation too awful to contemplate.

Then, just weeks after the conflict, Mr Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, for lunch at the White House. India deems him a hardline ideologue. He met Mr Trump alone, without members of the civilian government that nominally runs Pakistan. The pair discussed Iran and other affairs of state, as well as cryptocurrency deals that Pakistani interests are offering figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle. Hardest for Indians to stomach was that Mr Trump expressed no public concern about help that China offered Pakistan during the conflict, including (say people in Delhi) real-time intelligence allowing Pakistan to target Indian military assets, down to individual missile launchers.

For a decade or more, Indian foreign policy has placed great weight on the notion that America and China are locked in an ideological and economic contest that is sure to endure for years. In that context, India saw a chance to pitch itself to America as an indispensable hedge against China in Asia.

Now Indian elites are unsure how heavily China, and the need to contain its rise, weighs on Mr Trump in his second term. India “finds itself in a very difficult spot”, says a policy type in Delhi. In his telling, his country never really intended to take big risks in confronting and challenging China, a country with an economy five times the size of India’s and much stronger armed forces to boot. Rather, it was delighted to “fan the American fantasies that India might push back” against China.

Even if India’s willingness to confront China was in part a figment of America’s imagination, it was rewarded anyway. During the first Trump administration in 2020, when Chinese and Indian troops clashed on their Himalayan border, “the Americans were very generous” to India, offering real-time geospatial intelligence, says an analyst. In the Joe Biden era, India was feted in Washington as the world’s largest democracy. In the hope of strengthening such groupings as the Quad, which brings together America, Australia, India and Japan, officials quietly tolerated India buying copious amounts of Russian oil after the invasion of Ukraine. Such rewards are harder to earn now. On July 14th Mr Trump seemed to threaten all Russian trade partners with steep secondary sanctions should President Vladimir Putin not end his war in Ukraine within 50 days—though no one knows if he means it.

Meanwhile, China is growing more active in India’s backyard. Veteran Indian diplomats describe China meddling in the domestic politics of Nepal or taking sides in Sri Lanka in ways that would have been unthinkable just 15 years ago. To their relief, Indian envoys report that such Chinese swagger is a source of alarm to career officials in Washington. For their part, Indian business bosses describe deepening ties with American defence firms, and predict booming co-operation between India and the West.

For all that, policy types feel “clueless” about what Mr Trump thinks, and whether his America First worldview tilts towards confronting China or cutting deals with it. “We understand that Trump may go softer on China, that [his] fire-and-brimstone era is over, so we need to be careful,” says a foreign-policy thinker close to the government.

Trump Two: not like Trump One

India is not about to change its stance. It will still seek to balance competing powers and interests in a spirit of “cynical realism”, a tag used with pride in Delhi. Nor is India panicking. Policy types suggest that—from a national-security perspective—should Mr Trump pull back from Asia, then go-it-alone India is better placed than are formal treaty allies such as Japan or South Korea.

Still, India feels less sure-footed, especially in the economic realm. India has thrived by offering firms such as Apple a place to manufacture that is not China, responding to American calls for “friendshoring” production. But in his second term Mr Trump is often tougher on America-friendly trade partners than on adversaries such as China. At the same time, China seems warier of India’s rise. It recently ordered hundreds of Chinese engineers in Indian electronics plants to return home. Indian executives fret about reports of sophisticated Chinese-made machines being blocked from going to India. Among business and policy elites, no consensus exists about whether India should aim to decouple from China or try to accommodate its rulers in Beijing. If Mr Trump were predictable, such calculations would be easier. Because he is not, India walks on treacherous ground. ■

Business | Bartleby

Are superstars as good when they move jobs?

The AI-talent scramble raises an old question

Illustration: Paul Blow

Jul 17th 2025|4 min read

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The competition for the world’s best AI talent is frenzied. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, has personally taken charge of efforts to recruit for a “superintelligence” lab. The sums on offer are eye-watering: a rumoured $200m-plus to prise away the head of Apple’s AI models. OpenAI executives are said to be “recalibrating” compensation in order to ward off Mr Zuckerberg. But hiring hotshots makes sense only if you believe that talent is portable, and that superstars will continue to shine in their new organisations.

That is debatable. On average, internal hires outperform external ones. People promoted from within have some obvious immediate advantages over new joiners. They know who to approach to ask dumb questions; they can actually log in. If these kinds of basic procedural issues were the only problem, then a star should quickly brush them aside. But the more profound issue is that a person’s performance is not just a matter of their own brilliance. It is often inseparable from the context—the relationships, culture, processes and tacit knowledge—that surrounds a star.

A variety of studies have tried to tease out how much these firm-specific factors matter to the performance of hotshots. Perhaps the best-known research in this area has been done by Boris Groysberg of Harvard Business School. In one paper written with Linda-Eling Lee, of MSCI, and Ashish Nanda, also of Harvard, Mr Groysberg looked at the performance of the best investment analysts, as measured by external rankings, after they had moved firms.

In theory, a move ought not to have made much difference to how well they did their job: analysts often cover the same firms for the same clients. In practice, the stars’ performance declined compared with colleagues who stayed put. More recent research, by Claudia Gabbioneta of the University of York and her colleagues, found the same thing. They looked at recruitment among British corporate-law firms between 2000 and 2017, and found that, on average, practice areas that hired a star underperformed those that did not in the subsequent year.

That may be because incoming stars disrupt the performance of existing employees. A study by Matteo Prato of ESADE and Fabrizio Ferraro of IESE, both in Spain, also looked at the movement of securities analysts to see if the arrival of an ace affected their new colleagues. They found that the performance of the existing team fell, particularly among lower-ranked analysts; that fits with the hypothesis that stars will gobble resources and attention which might have gone to less celebrated peers.

There are nuances. In another co-written paper, Mr Groysberg looked at the performance of top American football players who moved teams. Wide receivers, whose job entails complicated plans involving words like scrimmage, did worse if they switched teams than those who did not. Punters, who are very good at kicking a ball but don’t have to interact much with their teammates, saw no such drop. If a job genuinely depends on individual prowess, talent can travel.

Alternatively, if high performance is caused by the interactions of a group of people, then one answer is to lift out an entire team. Changing employers did not greatly affect the performance of top-tier analysts who moved with their teammates, according to the study by Mr Groysberg et al. The personality of the new recruits also matters: a study of American biotech firms by Rebecca Kehoe of Cornell University and Daniel Tzabbar of Drexel University found that collaborative stars helped their peers become more productive.

A superstar strategy may make more sense when it comes to AI. This is a field where cutting-edge knowledge is at a premium. Small numbers of talented people can have a disproportionate impact. And there are fewer incumbent employees to disappoint. Equally, the research also suggests that stars do best when they move to a higher-performing firm; what they lose in organisational knowledge and relationships they make up for with an environment better able to harness their talents. Spraying money on stars in order to play catch-up, in other words, is a gamble that may not pay off. ■

Business | Schumpeter

Move over, Tim Cook. Jensen Huang is America Inc’s new China envoy

Nvidia’s boss is proving to be a canny diplomat

Illustration: Brett Ryder

Jul 17th 2025|5 min read

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AS A TEENAGER in Oregon, Jensen Huang was one mean ping-pong player. In 1978 his mentor, Lou Bochenski, described him in a letter to Sports Illustrated as “perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis” in the American north-west. Had he been a bit older, who knows, he might well have joined Bochenski’s daughter, Judy, who toured China in 1971 as part of Richard Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy” initiative to improve relations between the capitalist and communist worlds.

What the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia missed out on then he is making up for now, minus the table-tennis paddle. As America and China swap shots in the trade battle served up by Donald Trump, Mr Huang has pinged and ponged between Washington and Beijing to reassure both sides it is in their mutual interest to let his company keep selling some of its artificial-intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese buyers. In the past week he talked to Mr Trump and then jetted to China, for the third time this year.

On July 14th he notched up a big win. Nvidia said it would once again be permitted to sell its H20 AI processors in China. A de facto ban in April by the Trump administration on the sale of the chips, specially designed to comply with earlier export restrictions, may already have cost Nvidia around $10bn in forgone Chinese revenue. Its lifting may raise Nvidia’s sales this year by $10bn-15bn, around a tenth of the previously forecast total, and its net profit by $6bn-9bn. The day after the announcement the firm’s market value jumped by $160bn, to nearly $4.2trn. Its boss, who holds a 3.5% stake, scored nearly $6bn. Game, match, Huang?

Not quite. To see how things might play out differently for Nvidia, consider the experience of Tim Cook. For years Apple’s boss has been the undisputed champion of Sino-American commercial co-operation. First he engineered a hyper-efficient China-centric supply chain. Then, during Mr Trump’s first four years as president in 2017-21 and Joe Biden’s equally China-wary tenure, he safeguarded this network while hooking millions more Chinese consumers on iPhones. In 2019 he personally persuaded Mr Trump to scrap a proposed 25% tariff on certain imports from China by promising to make more Mac computers in America (never mind that Apple was probably going to do this anyway).

For a time the quiet lobbying paid off. Between 2012 and 2022 Apple’s sales and operating profits in China (and Taiwan) more than trebled, to $74bn and $31bn, respectively. In 2022 they made up 19% and 26% of the company’s total, up from 15% and 18% ten years earlier. As for the supply chain, examine the back of your iGizmo and the odds are it was “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.”

Now, though, Mr Cook’s powers of persuasion appear to be waning. In 2023 news reports surfaced that Chinese authorities had banned government employees from using iPhones. In part this was to reduce reliance on Western technology and promote domestic companies such as Huawei. It was also to spite America. Last year Apple sold just $67bn-worth of wares in China, down by 10% from its peak in 2022, even as its global sales grew.

In April Mr Cook helped secure an early exemption for electronics in Mr Trump’s latest tariff ruckus. Yet his effort to preserve Apple’s Chinese supply chain risks storing up more trouble for the future. Despite moving some production to places like India and Vietnam, one in five Apple suppliers remains Chinese. Its biggest contract manufacturer, Foxconn of Taiwan, has half its factories in China. This leaves the firm parlously exposed to the mood swings of Mr Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. In today’s bipolar geopolitics these are only a matter of time.

The effort Mr Cook has put into conserving the status quo may also have distracted him from more pressing concerns, such as coming up with a coherent AI strategy. The lack of one, combined with exposure to tariffs, is now hurting shareholders. Apple’s market value has shed close to $800bn since late December.

Mr Huang is not Mr Cook. He may lack the Alabamian’s disarming lilt but he seems more fluent both in MAGA and in Xi Jinping Thought. His company’s blog post announcing his recent globetrotting and success in reversing the H20 ban included shibboleths of America First (“...support for the Administration’s effort to create jobs, strengthen domestic AI infrastructure and onshore manufacturing, and ensure that America leads in AI worldwide”) and of Mr Xi (“The discussions underscored how researchers worldwide can advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.”)

Moreover, Nvidia is not Apple. Though it earns a sixth of its revenue from China, it is not reliant on suppliers there. None of its 20 biggest is Chinese, compared with four for Apple (which pays them $10bn a quarter not counting Foxconn, which gets $15.5bn). And in contrast to Apple, it has continued innovating relentlessly.

Break point

However, the chipmaker has more at stake—and not just because it is now the one defending the title of the world’s most valuable company. Its products are much more geopolitically sensitive than smartphones and thus likelier to face curbs of one form or another. On July 15th Mr Trump threatened fresh tariffs on chips. He also has yet to officially confirm‎ the H20 reversal.

If Nvidia were forced to forfeit China, that would deprive it of a growing market, unlike Apple’s stagnating one. Worse, it would be a boon for Chinese rivals such as Huawei. The local tech giant already offers AI chips more powerful than the H20 (though not yet Nvidia’s flagship processors). Having China all to itself would help it nurture a tech ecosystem to rival Nvidia’s, and export this globally. This gives Mr Huang as strong an incentive as Mr Cook had to protect the status quo. He must be careful that guarding the playing field doesn’t make him take his eye off the ball. ■

Finance & economics | Buttonwood

Stablecoins might cut America’s debt payments. But at what cost?

The Trump administration will take any help it can get

Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

Jul 16th 2025|4 min read

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ATRILLION DOLLARS. That number may keep Scott Bessent, America’s treasury secretary, up at night. Next year his government’s net interest payments will break the 13-figure mark. The combination of a bulging deficit, now worth 7% of GDP, and the sharp increase in government-bond yields over the past four years makes America’s budgetary mathematics increasingly ugly.

Ideas for how to squeeze the country’s interest bill, ideally without cutting spending or raising taxes, are thus at a premium. One has recently raised the hopes of Mr Bessent. Could stablecoins—cryptocurrency tokens backed by safe assets such as short-term Treasury bonds—drive up demand for American debt, and pull down borrowing costs?

The idea is not as outlandish as it seems. Regulatory certainty, which analysts believe is crucial to widespread stablecoin adoption, is on the way. The GENIUS bill, currently steaming through Congress, will allow Treasuries maturing in 93 days or fewer to be used as collateral. Tether, the biggest stablecoin, says it holds more Treasuries than all German investors combined. Citigroup, a bank, expects stablecoin issuance to surge from $257bn today to $1.6trn by 2030. Standard Chartered, another bank, is still more bullish: it thinks the coins will be worth $2trn in just three years.

Demand for dollar assets already helps the Federal Reserve keep down interest rates. In 2020 Thiago Ferreira and Samer Shousha, who worked at the central bank, estimated that the $6.1trn of Treasury bonds held overseas in 2015 reduced the neutral interest rate (that which keeps employment and inflation stable) by about 0.5 percentage points. If optimistic forecasts about stablecoin demand turn out to be correct, the volumes involved could be enough to significantly reduce America’s interest costs.

Indeed, research suggests that stablecoins are already tamping down yields. Sang Rae Kim of Kyung Hee University finds that a burst in tether issuance causes Treasury prices to rise over the subsequent hour, even if the effect then quickly fades. Other studies suggest a much bigger impact. Rashad Ahmed of the Andersen Institute for Finance and Economics and Iñaki Aldasoro of the Bank for International Settlements estimate that a $3.5bn inflow into stablecoins trims three-month Treasury yields by as much as 0.05 percentage points over the next 20 days.

Good news, then, for Mr Bessent. Yet taking advantage of any boom will be very difficult. If stablecoins grow big enough to meaningfully cut borrowing costs, they will also threaten both America’s government finances and the financial system.

An increase in the issuance of short-term government bonds would, for instance, create a new risk for Mr Bessent or his successor. At present, more short-term debt is an appealing idea. Investors expect the Fed to cut interest rates twice this year, which would lead quickly to lower borrowing costs. The problem is that when rates next go up the impact will feed through just as fast.

More important is what a stablecoin boom would do to the rest of the financial system. Trillions of dollars in invested capital will not be magicked into existence. If dollars invested in the coins come from money-market funds, the effect for the Treasury will be a wash, with money transferred from one vehicle invested in short-term bonds to another. If coinholders instead transfer money from bank deposits, that could put pressure on funding for American lenders, in time limiting the credit they can extend to customers. In this scenario, a stablecoin boom would be robbing private-sector Peter to pay public-sector Paul.

Some demand will come from overseas, which will be less of a problem. Stablecoins may be most useful for people in emerging markets with capital controls; an easily acquired dollar asset will protect them from expropriation and inflation. Yet JPMorgan Chase, a bank, estimates that only 6% of demand for stablecoins is now attributable to such investors. And they seem less likely to care about the regulatory certainty provided by the GENIUS bill.

Mr Bessent’s desire to hook the world on stablecoins is in some ways ironic. If foreign demand for the coins were to surge, then demand for the dollar would also climb. As a consequence, American consumers would gain purchasing power and American-made goods would become more expensive when purchased abroad. For a mercantilist administration, and a president who has long dreamed of reducing the trade deficit, that is quite a sting in the tail.■

Finance & economics | Free exchange

Why is AI so slow to spread? Economics can explain

Businesses are ignoring the street of hundred-dollar bills

Illustration: Alberto Miranda

Jul 17th 2025|5 min read

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Talk to executives and before long they will rhapsodise about all the wonderful ways in which their business is using artificial intelligence. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase recently said that his bank has 450 use cases for the technology. “AI will become the new operating system of restaurants,” according to Yum! Brands, which runs KFC and Taco Bell. AI will “play an important role in improving the traveller experience”, says the owner of Booking.com. In the first quarter of this year executives from 44% of S&P 500 companies discussed AI on earnings calls.

Whatever the executives may say, however, AI is changing business much more slowly than expected. A high-quality survey from America’s Census Bureau finds that a mere 10% of firms are using it in a meaningful way. “Enterprise adoption has disappointed,” notes a recent paper by UBS, a bank. Goldman Sachs, another bank, tracks companies that, in the view of its analysts, have “the largest estimated potential change to baseline earnings from AI adoption”. In recent months the firms’ share prices have underperformed the market. With its fantastic capabilities, AI represents hundred-dollar bills lying on the street. Why, then, are firms not picking them up? Economics may provide an answer.

Of course, it is still early days. Putting AI to use requires dealing with frictions, such as datasets that are not properly integrated into the cloud, meaning some lags were to be expected. AI diffusion has, though, disappointed even these more modest expectations. Analysts at Morgan Stanley once said that 2024 would be “the year of the adopters”. That came to little. This year was supposed to be “the year of agents”, involving autonomous systems that perform tasks based on data and predefined rules. But, according to the UBS paper, 2025 is instead “the year of agent eval‎uation”, with companies merely dipping their toes in the water. Perhaps there are deeper reasons for the disconnect between C-suite enthusiasm and sluggishness on the shop floor.

Economists of a “public choice” persuasion have long argued that government officials behave in a manner which maximises their personal gain, rather than furthering the public’s interests. Bureaucrats may refuse to implement necessary job cuts if doing so would put their friends out of work, for instance. Companies, especially large ones, may face similar problems. In the 1990s Philippe Aghion of the London School of Economics and Jean Tirole of Toulouse 1 Capitole University distinguished between “formal” and “real” authority. On paper, a chief executive has the power to mandate large-scale organisational change. In practice, the middle managers who understand the nitty-gritty and control day-to-day implementation of projects hold the real authority. They can shape, delay or even veto any change requested from above.

Public-choice dynamics are often at play when companies consider adopting new technologies. Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University has argued that “Throughout history technological progress has run into [a] powerful foe: the purposeful self-interested resistance to new technology.” Frederick Taylor, an engineer credited with introducing proper managerial techniques to America in the late 19th century, complained that power struggles within firms often jeopardise the adoption of new tech.

More recent research finds that these conflicts remain alive and well. In 2015 David Atkin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, published a paper examining factories in Pakistan that made footballs, discussing the fate of a new technology which reduced wastage. After 15 months, they found take-up remained “puzzlingly low”. The new tech slowed down certain employees, who as a result stood in the way of progress, “including by misinforming owners about the value of the technology”. Another paper, by Yuqian Xu of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Lingjiong Zhu of Florida State University, found similar battles between workers and managers in an Asian bank that is trying to automate its activities.

Few economists have yet examined intra-company battles over AI, but it seems likely they will be fierce. The modern firm in a rich country is astonishingly bureaucratised. American companies have 430,000 in-house lawyers, up from 340,000 a decade ago (a growth rate much faster than that of overall employment). Their role is generally to stop people doing things. They may worry about the risks of introducing AI products. With little to no case law, who is liable if a model goes wrong? Close to half the respondents to UBS’s surveys say that “compliance and regulatory concerns” are one of the main challenges for AI adoption in their company. Other legal eagles fret about the tech’s impact on boring things such as data privacy and discrimination.

People in other roles have their own concerns. HR staff (whose numbers in America have swollen by 40% over the past decade) may worry about the impact of AI on jobs, and thus put up roadblocks in front of adoption programmes. Meanwhile, Steve Hsu, a physicist at Michigan State University and an AI-startup founder, argues that many people behave like Pakistani football-makers. Middle managers worry about the long-term consequences of adopting AI. “If they use it to automate jobs one rung below them, they worry that their jobs will be next,” says Mr Hsu.

The tyranny of the inefficient

Over time market forces should encourage more companies to make serious use of AI. As with previous new technologies, such as the tractor and the personal computer, innovative firms ought to outcompete the holdouts and eventually put them out of business. Yet this process will take a while—too long, perhaps, for the big AI companies, which need to make huge profits on their investments in data centres. The irony of labour-saving automation is that people often stand in the way. ■

Science & technology | Artificial stupidity

Will AI make you stupid?

Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow

Illustration: enigmatriz

Jul 16th 2025|7 min read

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AS ANYBODY WHO has ever taken a standardised test will know, racing to answer an expansive essay question in 20 minutes or less takes serious brain power. Having unfettered access to artificial intelligence (AI) would certainly lighten the mental load. But as a recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests, that help may come at a cost.

Over the course of a series of essay-writing sessions, students working with (as well as without) ChatGPT were hooked up to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure their brain activity as they toiled. Across the board, the AI users exhibited markedly lower neural activity in parts of the brain associated with creative functions and attention. Students who wrote with the chatbot’s help also found it much harder to provide an accurate quote from the paper that they had just produced.

The findings are part of a growing body of work on the potentially detrimental effects of AI use for creativity and learning. This research points to important questions about whether the impressive short-term gains afforded by generative AI may incur a hidden long-term debt.

The MIT study augments the findings of two other high-profile studies on the relationship between AI use and critical thinking. The first, by researchers at Microsoft Research, surveyed 319 knowledge workers who used generative AI at least once a week. The respondents described undertaking more than 900 tasks, from summarising lengthy documents to designing a marketing campaign, with the help of AI. According to participants’ self-assessments, only 555 of these tasks required critical thinking, such as having to review an AI output closely before passing it to a client, or revising a prompt after the AI generated an inadequate result on the first go. The rest of the tasks were deemed essentially mindless. Overall, a majority of workers reported needing either less or much less cognitive effort to complete tasks with generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft’s own Copilot AI assistant, compared with doing those tasks without AI.

Another study, by Michael Gerlich, a professor at SBS Swiss Business School, asked 666 individuals in Britain how often they used AI and how much they trusted it, before posing them questions based on a widely used critical-thinking assessment. Participants who made more use of AI scored lower across the board. Dr Gerlich says that after the study was published he was contacted by hundreds of high-school and university teachers dealing with growing AI adoption among their students who, he says, “felt that it addresses exactly what they currently experience”.

Whether AI will leave people’s brains flabby and weak in the long term remains an open question. Researchers for all three studies have stressed that further work is needed to establish a definitive causal link between elevated AI use and weakened brains. In Dr Gerlich’s study, for example, it is possible that people with greater critical-thinking prowess are just less likely to lean on AI. The MIT study, meanwhile, had a tiny sample size (54 participants in all) and focused on a single narrow task.

Moreover, generative-AI tools explicitly seek to lighten people’s mental loads, as many other technologies do. As long ago as the 5th century BC, Socrates was quoted as grumbling that writing is not “a potion for remembering, but for reminding”. Calculators spare cashiers from computing a bill. Navigation apps remove the need for map-reading. And yet few would argue that people are less capable as a result.

There is little evidence to suggest that allowing machines to do users’ mental bidding alters the brain’s inherent capacity for thinking, says Evan Risko, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo who, along with a colleague, Sam Gilbert, coined the term “cognitive offloading” to describe how people shrug off difficult or tedious mental tasks to external aids.

The worry is that, as Dr Risko puts it, generative AI allows one to “offload a much more complex set of processes”. Offloading some mental arithmetic, which has only a narrow set of applications, is not the same as offloading a thought process like writing or problem-solving. And once the brain has developed a taste for offloading, it can be a hard habit to kick. The tendency to seek the least effortful way to solve a problem, known as “cognitive miserliness”, could create what Dr Gerlich describes as a feedback loop. As AI-reliant individuals find it harder to think critically, their brains may become more miserly, which will lead to further offloading. One participant in Dr Gerlich’s study, a heavy user of generative AI, lamented “I rely so much on AI that I don’t think I’d know how to solve certain problems without it.”

Many companies are looking forward to the possible productivity gains from greater adoption of ai. But there could be a sting in the tail. “Long-term critical-thinking decay would likely result in reduced competitiveness,” says Barbara Larson, a professor of management at Northeastern University. Prolonged AI use could also make employees less creative. In a study at the University of Toronto, 460 participants were instructed to propose imaginative uses for a series of everyday objects, such as a car tyre or a pair of trousers. Those who had been exposed to ideas generated by AI tended to produce answers deemed less creative and diverse than a control group who worked unaided.

When it came to the trousers, for instance, the chatbot proposed stuffing a pair with hay to make half of a scarecrow—in effect suggesting trousers be reused as trousers. An unaided participant, by contrast, proposed sticking nuts in the pockets to make a novelty bird feeder.

There are ways to keep the brain fit. Dr Larson suggests that the smartest way to get ahead with AI is to limit its role to that of “an enthusiastic but somewhat naive assistant”. Dr Gerlich recommends that, rather than asking a chatbot to generate the final desired output, one should prompt it at each step on the path to the solution. Instead of asking it “Where should I go for a sunny holiday?”, for instance, one could start by asking where it rains the least, and proceed from there.

Members of the Microsoft team have also been testing AI assistants that interrupt users with “provocations” to prompt deeper thought. In a similar vein, a team from Emory and Stanford Universities have proposed rewiring chatbots to serve as “thinking assistants” that ask users probing questions, rather than simply providing answers. One imagines that Socrates might heartily approve.

Get with the program

Such strategies might not be all that useful in practice, however, even in the unlikely event that model-builders tweaked their interfaces to make chatbots clunkier, or slower. They could even come at a cost. A study by Abilene Christian University in Texas found that AI assistants which repeatedly jumped in with provocations degraded the performance of weaker coders on a simple programming task.

Other potential measures to keep people’s brains active are more straightforward, if also rather more bossy. Overeager users of generative AI could be required to come up with their own answer to a query, or simply wait a few minutes, before they’re allowed to access the AI. Such “cognitive forcing” may lead users to perform better, according to Zana Buçinca, a researcher at Microsoft who studies these techniques, but will be less popular. “People do not like to be pushed to engage,” she says. Demand for workarounds would therefore probably be high. In a demographically representative survey conducted in 16 countries by Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, 47% of respondents said they would use generative-AI tools even if their employer forbade it.

The technology is so young that, for many tasks, the human brain is still the sharpest tool in the toolkit. But in time both the consumers of ai and its regulators will have to assess whether its wider benefits outweigh any cognitive costs. If stronger evidence emerges that ai makes people less intelligent, will they care?

Science & technology | Bedtime story

Why do people sleep? A new study points to the brain

Experiments on fruit flies suggest tiredness could be caused by damaged neurons

You snooze, you fusePhotograph: Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Jul 16th 2025|3 min read

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IT IS HARD to overstate the importance of sleep. Regular hours of rest offer organisms of all sizes a chance to consolidate memories, repair cells and boost the health of their immune systems. But the source of the urge to sleep, known to scientists as sleep pressure (and everyone else as tiredness), has remained elusive.

Many theories have been put forward. One pins the blame on the build-up of a brain chemical called adenosine. Another points the finger at the brain’s need to build synaptic connections. A study published in Nature on July 16th offers the strongest evidence yet that the urge to sleep is caused by a build-up of electrons in the mitochondria of certain brain cells. If true, sleep may have originally emerged as a way of repairing mitochondria, with its other benefits evolving later.

Mitochondria, which can be found in almost all human and animal cells, supply energy by stripping electrons from fuel molecules derived from food. But some electrons leak out of the mitochondria while this takes place, reacting with oxygen to produce toxic by-products that can damage the mitochondria, as well as other parts of the cell, if they build up.

The new study suggests that when too much mitochondrial damage is detected in brain cells known as sleep-control neurons, they trigger sleep. These neurons act like circuit-breakers, says Gero Miesenböck at Oxford University, one of the paper’s lead authors, tripping the brain into sleep before too many electrons build up. Sleep simultaneously restores the balance of electrons and allows the mitochondrial damage to be repaired.

To reach their conclusions, the scientists conducted a series of experiments on fruit flies. They started by labelling the sleep-control neurons in the flies’ brains, known as dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs), with a genetically engineered protein that made them glow green. They then disrupted the flies’ natural sleep cycles by placing them on a platform that was kept in constant motion for 12 hours.

When the fluorescent dFBNs were subsequently viewed under a microscope, the mitochondria within were found to have split apart, a sign of electron-related damage. After a period of sleep, however, they had fused back together.

This suggested that mitochondrial damage might drive the urge to sleep. To determine if the relationship was causal, the scientists then manipulated the balance of electrons in the mitochondria in several other ways.

Most telling was an experiment in which the researchers provided mitochondria in the dFBNs with an alternative power source: namely a protein that uses light for energy. When the researchers shone a flashlight on flies that were not sleep-deprived, their mitochondria could supply energy without needing to use their stash of electrons. This increased the chance of an electron leak. Within the first hour of exposure to the flashlight the engineered flies were much more likely to fall asleep than those in control groups.

Ivana Rosenzweig, a specialist in the neuroscience of sleep at King’s College London who was not involved in the study, says that the findings represent a significant conceptual shift. Although electron imbalance in mitochondria had been suspected to correlate with a lack of sleep, she believes this study provides evidence that it may be the cause of sleep pressure.

As the way cells are supplied with energy is closely linked to sleep across many animal species, the authors say it is likely that electron build-up could cause sleep pressure in humans, too. They further note that humans with mitochondrial disorders often report a feeling of sleepiness unrelated to muscle fatigue. Professor Miesenböck hopes that a better understanding of sleep pressure will help shed light on a range of sleep disorders and chronic conditions that count fatigue as a symptom. ■

Science & technology | Well informed

Should you take creatine?

The performance-enhancing drug is legal, safe—and may have benefits beyond sport

Illustration: Cristina Spanò

Jul 11th 2025|3 min read

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IF YOU are an athlete in search of a chemical boost your options are limited. Many of the drugs that are known to work—anabolic steroids to make you stronger, say, or erythropoietin to boost your endurance—are banned and come with nasty side-effects. Many legal supplements, meanwhile, seem not to do anything useful.

An exception is creatine, a staple of sports nutrition and one of the few supplements with a solid evidence base behind it. One review paper from 2017 concluded that creatine can give athletes a 10-20% performance boost in brief bouts of high-intensity exercise, such as sprinting past a defender or lifting heavy weights. It appears to be safe, too, with no worrying side-effects seen even in people who have been taking the stuff for years. Because there is no test that can distinguish supplementary creatine from the sort naturally produced by the body, or indeed the kind found in meat and fish, most sports do not consider taking it to be doping.

Creatine works mainly by increasing the amount of energy that muscles can produce. Cells use a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as a carrier of chemical energy. Aerobic respiration, which uses oxygen to break down fats or sugar, is by far the most efficient way of making ATP. But it is relatively slow. When muscles need a lot of ATP in a hurry most of it is supplied instead by the phosphocreatine system which, as its name suggests, relies on creatine to work. (A third pathway, the glycolytic system, sits between the other two in both power and efficiency.)

When muscles contract, the ATP molecules used to power that contraction lose one of their three phosphate groups, turning into adenosine diphosphate (ADP).

Phosphocreatine stored in the muscles can donate a replacement phosphate group, turning ADP back into ATP, which can then power more contractions. But those reserves are sufficient for only a few seconds of maximal effort (this is why it is impossible to run a marathon at the same pace as one would run 100 metres). Creatine supplements boost the amount of phosphocreatine that can be stored, allowing users to squeeze out a couple of extra reps or sprint at full power for a second longer.

That may not be the only benefit. A growing body of research suggests creatine may be good for brains as well as brawn. That makes sense: neurons need ATP just as muscle cells do, and the brain is hungry for energy.

Despite accounting for about 2% of the body’s mass, the brain is thought to consume around 20% of its calories.

As summarised in a review published in 2021 in Nutrients, some studies have suggested that creatine might sharpen things like short-term memory or reaction times. Others have reported it may lessen the symptoms of mental-health problems such as depression, and tentative evidence suggests it improves cognition in those with Alzheimer’s disease. Both may be associated with a misallocation of energy within the brain.

In animals creatine seems to protect against the effects of concussions, which likewise seem to play havoc with the way brain cells are supplied with energy. In one study rats given creatine supplements showed a 50% reduction in damage after they were given an artificially induced brain injury. For now, the evidence regarding brains is not nearly as robust as that regarding muscles. But as sport is a common cause of concussions, athletes taking creatine might get two benefits for the price of one. ■

Culture | Getup to get down

Feather boas and bald caps: the wacky world of concert fashion

Why dressing up is now an essential part of the live music experience

The must-have moustachePhotograph: Eyevine/Redux/New York Times/Ayesha Kazim

Jul 15th 2025|4 min read

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LIKE MANY pop stars, Pitbull exudes sexual confidence. In his hit song of 2009, “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)”, the American rapper repeats that phrase no fewer than 16 times. Yet Pitbull seems to have got it slightly wrong. His fans do not want him: they want to look like him.

At every stop on his European tour, fans—most of them women—have been dressing as the artist. They have been donning suits, fake goatees and, crucially, bald caps (see picture). The fact that this looks ludicrous rather than stylish seems to only add to their merriment. In June, when Pitbull was performing in Britain, searches for bald caps surged by an estimated 760%.

The dressing-up trend is harmless fun. Yet it reveals a lot about fandom, and the way people enjoy concerts today. It is no longer the done thing to buy a ticket to a gig and turn up in any old kit: instead, the most committed fans demonstrate their affection for the artist by wearing the right stuff. That means parkas for Oasis, mini skirts for Sabrina Carpenter and cowboy gear for Beyoncé’s latest tour.

This is not entirely new: people wore Ziggy Stardust face paint to watch David Bowie perform in the early 1970s and mimicked their favourite Spice Girl in the 1990s. But what has changed is the breadth and depth of fans’ devotion to fancy dress. On TikTok hundreds of thousands of #ConcertOutfit videos show fans trading ideas for gigs of all genres. Many start preparing their outfits months in advance. Some talk about what they will wear to an event they have not yet acquired a ticket for.

Chappell Roan, an American singer-songwriter, sets themes for her shows and encourages followers to discuss their outfits on Discord, a messaging platform. Brands and fashion labels have curated concert-specific collections; Fanatics and Complex launched a range with Blackpink, a K-pop group, for the American leg of their tour. “It’s a feedback loop,” Lucy Bennett, a specialist in fan culture at Cardiff University, says. “Fans start it, artists amplify it and brands follow.”

Photograph: Eyevine

The pandemic provided an impetus. After months of being cooped up at home, people celebrated being in stadiums rather than on the sofa by wearing flamboyant apparel. When Harry Styles’s “Love on Tour” gigs were able to go ahead in 2021 after delays, fans copied his outfits and turned up in a riot of colour. (Sales of feather boas, of the sort that he had worn to the Grammys that year, took flight.) By making a special effort, Mr Styles’s admirers conveyed that they did not take the concert—or him—for granted.

The same was true of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Tickets were so hard to obtain that many who managed to snag one felt the need to prove their Swiftie credentials. Some created detailed replicas of her past outfits or fashioned looks based on obscure lyrical references. The theme of the tour—a retrospective of the pop star’s 11 studio albums—gave fans plenty of inspiration, from the pastel-hued “Lover” record to the snake-themed “Reputation”.

Musicians are more likely than other kinds of entertainer to inspire such dedication. According to a study by Deloitte, a consultancy, 37% of people regard their love of a particular musician to be “extremely or somewhat important to their identity”, more than their support of a sports team (35%), tv show (27%) or movie franchise (21%). The generations who most cherish their fandom, Gen Z and millennials, are also the generations who strongly value experiences. If you are paying handsomely to attend a concert—the average price of a ticket to Ms Swift’s tour was $250, and climbed to $7,000 on resale sites—you may as well go all out.

Concerts today are immersive spectacles with custom-built stages, lavish digital designs, props and pyrotechnics. Clothes offer a way to participate in the extravaganza and feel part of a community of like-minded folk. When fans dress up, it “blurs the line between performer and audience, where the live music show is not just on stage any more, but instead, it’s all around you”, says Ms Bennett. Watching Pitbull, in short, is a lot more fun if you’re surrounded by thousands of people in bald caps. ■

Obituary | The joy of veg

Simon Groot scattered better plant seeds across the world

The seedsman from Enkhuizen died on July 6th, aged 90

Photograph: East-West Seed

Jul 17th 2025|5 min read

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What started him thinking was a cabbage. Not any old cabbage, but the variety, “Glory of Enkhuizen”, which his family company, Sluis and Groot, had produced in that town in North Holland in 1899. It was a beautiful cabbage, round, compact, with a light-green head framed in darker leaves. It could weigh as much as three kilograms, had a sweet flavour, and was easy to grow, as it did all over Europe.

But not here. Simon Groot was walking in the highlands of Java, on a sales trip for the company in 1965, when he came across a field of them. They were a sorry sight, sparse and with misshapen heads. Clearly the seed was not quite right, messed up or mixed in, adulterated somehow; he hated nothing more than bad seed. But it was also clear that these cabbages, which shrugged off frost, did not enjoy a semitropical climate and could not cope with local pests and diseases. Meanwhile the farmers who had sown them, unable to sell them, remained as poor as ever.

For 16 years he brooded on this. It became his mission. In 1981, when Sluis and Groot was sold to Sandoz, he branched out on his own to improve the seeds, crops, trade and nutrition of the tropical parts of the world. The staple grains (especially wheat in India and rice in China) had been hybridised already, with great success, but lowly vegetables had been ignored. He, by contrast, loved them. Producing fine vegetable and flower seed had been the family business since 1867, when venerable, bearded Groots had pioneered the work in Enkhuizen. Seeds had been lucky for the town, too; because of close contacts with local farmers, it did not suffer the famine that followed the war.

For him the vegetables of tropical Asia were a cornucopia of species he had never met before. Amaranth, with grain-heads like huge catkins; kangkong, or water spinach, growing in any fresh water; mung beans, full of protein in both seeds and sprouts; daikon, tatsoi, choy sum. All were packed with vitamins and good nutrition. As a seedsman more used to cauliflowers and potatoes, he was fascinated. As a market man, here was a huge chance.

He surpassed his own expectations. By the 2020s the seeds produced by his company, East-West Seed, had improved the incomes of 20m small farmers in more than 80 countries, from Asia to Latin America to Africa. The company’s red-arrow logo was as well-known to them as the sign for Coca-Cola. He also set up a programme in which successful farmers trained their neighbours. With better seed, farmers stayed in farming, market traders had more to sell and consumers had healthier diets. That simple formula lifted everyone.

Seeds came first, carefully bred by cross-pollination to produce the right traits. But the farmers were key. He talked to them constantly, a tall and almost colonial figure in his white clothes and sun-hat, to learn to think with them. Most of them had plots of only one or two hectares, so vegetables were an ideal crop. Routinely, though, the glossy packets they started with had bad genetics inside. They then saved the seed from their crop from year to year, because they were poor and it cost nothing. So, inevitably, their harvests declined.

Yet they were most reluctant to change. When he set up his first base in the Philippines in 1982 and, after many months, produced his first hybridised seed, farmers were loth to try it. The plant was ampalaya or bitter gourd, not unlike a fat, warty cucumber, astringent but useful to bulk out a stir-fry; so many farmers already grew it. The new variety was called “Jade Star”. It could resist downy mildew, its chief threat, but almost all the trial crops failed. Hence the importance of any farmer who had succeeded passing on his knowledge of how to handle the seeds, space them, fertilise and irrigate them. Seed was all about trust: trust that the tiny speck you sowed would grow into the plant you imagined. Both would take time to appear.

Over decades, though, the farmers were won over. When the crops did well, they were extraordinary: healthy, profuse and vigorous. As more vegetables were hybridised, tomatoes began to flourish in the Indonesian lowlands, where they could not grow before; productivity per plant of bird’s eye chili, a Thai favourite, increased by 30-40%, and long beans grew like forests. Farm incomes doubled and sometimes even tripled. Certain cases became famous. One woman did so well with chai sim, a leaf vegetable, that she built a kitchen and bought a motorbike. Another produced a pile of pumpkins worth $3,500 from $6-worth of seed.

Hybridisation meant that seed from the crop could not be kept, because the second crop would be unreliable. But he set the price of new seed as low as he could. In 2017 the company sold 24m “value-packs”, enough for a small plot, for the equivalent of a dollar each. Any profits went to growth and research. The farmers seemed to take this system in their stride. When he visited them in later years they cheered for joy and held parties for him.

In 2019 he was awarded the World Food Prize, a nutritional equivalent of the Nobel. His work, however, was far from done. In Asia he still hoped to shift more farmers away from rice; the world had plenty of that, and carbohydrates, as well as meat, were starting to feature too much in Asian diets. Plants needed constant fortifying to adapt to climate change. And he had barely made a start on Africa, where small farmers were struggling terribly and the potential for growth was so obvious.

In one of his late interviews he appeared with an array of home-grown vegetables in front of him. His tomatoes and French beans, laid out on a dark-wood table, looked as glossy and beautiful as a still life from the Dutch Golden Age. The vegetable he most often chose to pose with, however, was not the “Glory of Enkhuizen”. It was the warty, bitter, ugly “Jade Star”, which had transformed the lives of his farmer-friends 6,000 miles away. ■