The Economist Articles for Aug. 3rd week : Aug. 17th(Interpretation)

[Statesman]

The Economist Articles for Aug. 3rd week : Aug. 17th(Interpretation)

Economist Reading-Discussion Cafe :

다음카페 : http://cafe.daum.net/econimist

네이버카페 : http://cafe.naver.com/econimist

Leaders | War in Gaza

Why Israel must hold itself to account

And how it can be made to do so

Aug 7th 2025|6 min read

---

ON MAY 14TH 1948, in its Declaration of Independence, Israel embraced universal human rights “irrespective of religion, race or sex”. This belief in individual human dignity is also enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, submitted to governments that same month. Today the founding vision of Israel and the laws of war are under attack in Gaza. In its bombed and barren landscape the fate of both lies in the balance.

From the beginning, the world has struggled to live up to the high ideals of 1948. Israel was born in violence and ever since it has wrestled with the tension between upholding universal rights and being the home of a people in a contested land. The cold war was a stand-off between two systems that too often treated humanitarian law as inconvenient. Even so, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union gave rise to aspirations that law-breaking leaders could be held to account.

Gaza shows how this vision is failing. The laws of war are being broken and the system for upholding them is not working. However, that failure does not exonerate Israel from having to answer for its actions in Gaza, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indeed, its foundations as a liberal democracy demand that it must.

Something has gone very wrong in Gaza. Israel’s just war against the terrorists who massacred its people on October 7th 2023 has turned into death and destruction on a biblical scale. Most of Gaza lies in ruins, millions of civilians are displaced and tens of thousands have been killed. And still, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, cannot stop himself. This week it emerged that he wants to occupy all of Gaza. But Hamas is no longer a military threat, so the war no longer has a strategy and fighting on is no longer just.

Worse, Israel’s government, despite its duties as an occupying power, has used the distribution of food to civilians as a weapon against Hamas. It continued even when, as predicted, that led to starvation and the death of desperate people queuing for survival rations. By corralling civilians in pockets as it systematically bulldozes their homes, Israel is also practising ethnic cleansing.

Gaza is not alone. Civilians are being slaughtered and driven from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and pretty much every other warzone today. Hamas, don’t forget, started the current Gaza conflict 22 months ago with an orgy of hostage-taking and crimes against humanity. Instead of seeking peace, it has gorged on the misery of its own people. It recently described the recognition of a Palestinian state promised by Britain, Canada and France as the “fruits” of October 7th.

Yet Hamas’s crimes do not excuse Israel. The Jewish state is a democracy. It should hold itself to higher standards than terrorists, warlords and dictators.

At the same time as the laws of war are being broken, the system that enshrines them is failing. The Geneva Conventions sought to spare civilians. However, they were drawn up for wars between states. Most conflicts today involve at least one militia, which makes separating fighters from civilians hard. Under Geneva’s code, the high ratio of civilian to military casualties in Gaza is not proof of crimes. Israel has loosened its rules of engagement, but the strip is crowded; Hamas knowingly shelters among civilians. In such circumstances many civilians die, as America once learned in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Fallujah.

The International Criminal Court is becoming activist, issuing warrants for the arrest of Mr Netanyahu and his then defence minister before the Israeli system had time to act. The courts have also become tools in ongoing “lawfare”. South Africa accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice just 12 weeks after October 7th, allowing activists to bolster their campaigns demanding boycotts of Israel by the West long before a judgment is reached.

Activists dream that the courts will impose their notion of virtue on a world that does not share their values. They are doomed to fail. The big powers, including America and China, do not recognise the courts. International law takes a long time to issue final judgments. It has limited powers of enforcement. A case brought today may one day be a deterrent, but it is a poor tool for stopping war crimes as they unfold.

That sounds like a counsel of despair, but it is not. And the reason goes back to 1948. The laws of war were not just a cudgel with which to beat militarists and Nazis. They were also the latest example in a long history of some belligerents imposing restraints on themselves. The question therefore is whether Israel, founded as a democratic, universalist state, still cleaves to that tradition.

In the past Israel has managed to investigate wars and hold some political and military leaders responsible. It is comparable to other countries at investigating atrocities by soldiers, albeit slowly and with a focus on the lower ranks—as with a lethal strike on the staff from the World Central Kitchen in 2024. However, as we report, higher-level accountability is lacking. The Supreme Court and the attorney-general are caught up in a domestic power struggle with Mr Netanyahu. When it comes to criticising the government over Gaza they have been missing in action.

Tried and tested

It is not too late. The urgent test is whether Israel floods Gaza with food and medicine in order to stop the incipient famine. It should also agree on a ceasefire, which will enable it to recover its hostages. The second, longer-term test will be whether it sets up a truly independent commission of inquiry after the war ends, probably under a new prime minister.

The outside world and especially the United States have a role in making this happen. No American president in recent times has been less likely to respect international law than Donald Trump. But peace in Gaza would help him stabilise a volatile region and reset relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. America has repeatedly intervened to stop Israel’s wars in the past. This week roughly 600 former Israeli security officials urged Mr Trump to act again today.

Those officials understand that Israel has an interest in the law, too. Some Israelis calculate that they can do what they like now and patch up relations with the West later. But views of Israel are bleak in Europe and are changing in America among Democrats and the MAGA right. If Israel becomes an ethno-nationalist state that annexes the West Bank and crushes its people, the violence will not cease.

You might argue that, after suffering the worst attack in its history, Israel will have no appetite for prosecuting its own leaders. However, the penetrating insight which emerges from the Geneva Conventions is that countries which break the laws of war without shame or recourse do not just harm their victims: they also harm themselves.

Israel has an existential interest in seeing justice done. If instead it glorifies those who orchestrate famine and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, its politics and society will lurch towards demagoguery and authoritarianism. The young, idealistic country that was born in May 1948 will have been eclipsed. ■

Leaders | Ripe for transformation

McKinsey and its peers need a strategic rethink

AI could make consultancy more effective—or redundant

Illustration: George(s)

Aug 7th 2025|4 min read

---

Since the birth of management consultancy at the turn of the 20th century, people have questioned its usefulness. Bosses of firms that hire consultants are paid lavishly to define a vision and corral their teams into achieving it. Why would they ask a bunch of jet-setting know-it-alls who have never run anything but a spreadsheet calculation how to do their job?

Over the decades, however, consultants have proved their worth, and not just because their clients are lazy, incompetent or scared of making difficult decisions. In 1990 McKinsey, bcg and Bain, the three elite strategy advisers, had a few thousand staff between them. Today they employ around 90,000. Over the past decade their combined revenue has more than doubled. And they do seem to offer useful advice. Recent research finds that companies which hire strategy consultants experience a significant and sustained improvement in productivity relative to those that don’t. Now, though, the industry is heading for disruption. If consultants are to stay useful, they need to rethink what they do.

The value of consultancies lies chiefly in their experience of similar problems at other clients. Situations a chief executive might encounter only once in a career, such as a big merger or relocating a factory, are rarely unique. Some critics argue that consultants who swan in and out of clients tend to offer elegant but impractical recommendations. But that view is out of date. In recent years the strategy trio have moved deeper into helping clients implement their advice: for example, by helping them digitise their businesses. And they are increasingly tying their fees to the success of their projects, thereby aligning their interests with those of their clients.

For the bright young things these firms hire, the experience seems to pay off. Many of the world’s biggest businesses, from Alphabet to Coca-Cola, are run by alumni of the elite three consultancies. And our analysis suggests that these companies outperform their peers.

As the age of artificial intelligence (AI) beckons, however, the corporate world’s consiglieri face an uncertain future. Plenty of senior partners quietly scoff at the idea that the technology will be anything but a blessing for an industry that has mastered the art of jumping on every new management craze. Already companies struggling to make use of AI have turned to the strategy advisers for help. For their part, the consultancies have built bots trained on their intellectual property that can perform much of the grunt work behind their projects.

But what happens when AI models also start producing the kinds of alliterative three-part frameworks those senior partners so proudly present? In recent years the firms’ core business of strategic advice has grown robustly alongside the push into implementation; soon it may come under strain. Meanwhile, fast-growing technology providers such as Palantir are also helping clients deploy AI systems, which could force the traditional consultants to retreat.

To remain relevant, the industry will have to adapt. Generic ideas recycled from client to client will become of little use. To compete with ever smarter AI models, the approach of training up generalist advisers will have to give way to earlier and deeper specialisation, including in the art of managing change. That, combined with the need for fewer minions to do a senior partner’s bidding, will require the firms to rethink whom they hire and how they nurture them.

To a degree, these changes are already under way at the elite trio. To help clients implement their ideas, they have hired thousands of specialists such as coders. BCG’s success in using these experts is at least part of the reason why it is on track to overtake McKinsey as the largest of the three firms.

Time to SWOT up

To succeed in the decades ahead, however, a more extensive overhaul will be needed. As the firms expend time and energy reinventing themselves, they will have to accept that there are some problems, particularly those relating to technology, that others are better placed to help their clients solve.

All this will require humility, something that does not come easily to many in the industry. Consultants often speak of the need for transformation. Now they will have to live it. ■

Asia | Banyan

Nuclear nightmares are back

A grim anniversary points to fading memories and a fraying world order

Illustration: Lan Truong

Aug 6th 2025|4 min read

---

The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had to live through several stages of trauma. First came the horrors of August 6th and August 9th 1945: the blinding flash, the ferocious force, the flesh-melting heat; plus the black rain, the flattened buildings, the charred corpses. “It was a real hell,” recalls Tanaka Shigemitsu, who was just four years old in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped there. Then came decades of quiet suffering, as radiation ate away at victims’ bodies and stigma at their souls. Finally there have been the frustrations of recent years, as the hope of a world without nuclear weapons has receded into the distance.

This year’s anniversaries, the 80th, come at an especially worrying time. As recently as 2009, nuclear weapons seemed increasingly anachronistic. Barack Obama, then America’s newly elected president, spoke seriously of a nuclear-free world. Instead, the world has entered what strategists call a “third nuclear age”, messier and more combustible than ever before. “The danger of nuclear weapons being used has never been as imminent at any time during the past 80 years,” laments Mr Tanaka, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, an association of hibakusha, as the atomic-bomb survivors are known in Japan.

Read our original reporting on the atomic bombings in Archive 1945

Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine helped usher in this new era, but the underlying developments are deeper. The arms-control architecture of the cold war has broken down. The New START treaty, the last remaining pact between America and Russia limiting nuclear arms, is due to expire next year. Existing nuclear states are building up and modernising arsenals. America’s nuclear umbrella, which offers assurances of protection to vulnerable allies, is fraying, prompting discussions about nuclear armament in countries such as Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Even in Japan, talk of acquiring a bomb is no longer beyond the pale.

Around the world, the “nuclear taboo”, the shared moral revulsion that has helped control the use of nuclear weapons, seems to be weakening. Threats have become ever more overt. Just last week, as hibakusha prepared for ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America’s president and the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council traded nuclear barbs on social media like internet trolls.

The dawn of this new nuclear age is not for lack of effort on the part of the hibakusha. Achieving political miracles was always an unfair burden to place upon them, but for decades survivors like Mr Tanaka have been telling their stories across Japan and around the world, hoping to bring about disarmament. Nihon Hidankyo received last year’s Nobel peace prize for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”; hibakusha have also been central to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a network that won the peace prize in 2017 for pushing the United Nations to adopt a treaty barring the development, acquisition, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, not one of the world’s nuclear states has signed up.

For the Japanese government, the new nuclear age heightens a long-standing tension. Japan believes it has a special responsibility, as the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons, to advocate for disarmament. But it also depends on nuclear deterrence to ensure its security in a dangerous neighbourhood, facing three nuclear-armed states: China, Russia and North Korea. At a ceremony in Hiroshima on August 6th, Ishiba Shigeru, the prime minister, promised to “work with all our might” to realise a “world without nuclear weapons”. Yet much to the chagrin of the hibakusha, Japan has also refused to sign the new UN treaty.

And the hibakusha will not be around to speak out much longer. “We are approaching an era when hibakusha are no longer with us,” notes Suzuki Shiro, Nagasaki’s mayor. Efforts are under way in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to keep their memories alive for future generations. Both cities have been training scores of “atomic-bomb legacy successors”—memory keepers tasked with inheriting a specific hibakusha story.

But fewer than 100,000 officially recognised hibakusha are now alive, down from a peak of nearly 400,000. Many of those still around were quite young at the time, like Mr Tanaka: the average age of the remaining survivors is 86. It is surely no coincidence that a new nuclear era is dawning just as the hibakusha’s voices are growing quieter. ■

China | China’s AI juggernaut

Six months after DeepSeek’s breakthrough, China speeds on with AI

Real-world applications have priority over cutting-edge development

Aug 5th 2025|HANGZHOU|7 min read

---

THE MECCA for China’s boom in artificial intelligence is Liangzhu, a leafy suburb of Hangzhou, the tech-heavy capital of Zhejiang province. The Communist Party has long touted Liangzhu’s famous archaeological remains, dating back to 3300BC, as proof of the age of Chinese civilisation. Now Liangzhu, with its myriad AI startups, represents the future. Investors from all over China flock there to meet growing numbers of founders, app engineers and other AI developers and dreamers. It is six months since a barely known AI startup, DeepSeek, caused a huge stir by releasing an impressive open-source model trained for a sliver of the cost of fancier Western ones. Its founder studied at Zhejiang University, a tech mothership not far from Liangzhu. The area is at the heart of an AI ecosystem which China hopes will soon rival America’s.

The signs are promising. Last month three Chinese labs introduced stellar large-language models that are reckoned to be among the world’s best. AI technologies have “broken through the critical threshold of usefulness”, says one early-stage investor who frequents Liangzhu. He predicts a surge in how AI can be applied. “Once the water boils,” he says, “many people want to build a steam engine.”

Sam Hu, at a sunny café in Liangzhu’s main plaza, is one such person. After stints at Tencent, a tech giant, and two ride-hailing firms, last year Mr Hu struck out on his own to develop an AI agent that helps managers make decisions. The moment was right. These days, he explains, “the cost of trial and error is lower.”

The prize for Mr Hu and his peers is enormous. Morgan Stanley, a bank, predicts that China’s AI industry will grow from $3.2bn last year to $140bn by 2030; that figure jumps to $1.4trn when AI-related sectors such as infrastructure and component suppliers are included. In June last year some 8% of Greater China firms surveyed by Gartner, a consultancy, were using generative AI. Less than a year later the figure had leapt to 43%.

The question now is how to keep the industry steaming along. Some of the early frenzy around DeepSeek has passed, and plenty of users still grumble about how models can “hallucinate”. But DeepSeek’s breakthrough has helped shift China’s approach to AI in profound ways. It has lowered costs and moved the emphasis away from cutting-edge development and cut-throat competition among developers of AI models towards explorations of how AI can be applied across business, industry, the public sector and society itself. The importance of AI for China—and indeed the way it can outdo America, its AI promoters increasingly argue—is through its adoption, adaptation and diffusion: that is, spreading the use of AI more broadly.

It helps greatly that China’s leadership believes the same thing, and is offering state backing. President Xi Jinping’s handshake with DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, broadcast earlier this year into the country’s living rooms, helped transform how ordinary Chinese view AI. Grandparents were suddenly keen to try out chatbots. The early frenzy was all a bit over the top, says Louis Dong, who developed AI courses for schoolchildren after parents bombarded the education company he works for with requests. Now, Mr Dong says, the focus is on identifying applications for specific industries and putting AI capabilities to pragmatic use. Rapid adoption is key, many experts argue, and DeepSeek’s breakthrough, along with advances in other models, is enabling it.

Companies appear to be adopting a more can-do attitude by experimenting with the technology. There is still room for improvement. Accenture, a consultancy, found that 46% of Chinese firms have broadly integrated generative AI, but only 9% saw real benefit in productivity or profit growth. It is early days, AI executives insist. Jiang Xinghua, chief technology officer at Yizhi Intelligence, which develops AI customer-service agents for retailers and AI livestreamers for beauty brands, says ever more clients want to adopt AI-enabled products, and are even tolerant of them making minor mistakes.

A big question is how much AI products can improve. A lot, say the techno-optimists. Chinese efforts to train new models have been complicated by America’s ban on exports of its most advanced AI chips. In April President Donald Trump’s administration banned shipments to China of Nvidia’s H20 chip, which is deliberately hobbled to make it less effective for training (though it is well suited to “inference”—the process of actually running AI models for customers). In July America reversed course. Yet the political uncertainty and risk remain.

Strikingly, China’s AI development seems to sail on through the turbulence. At a huge AI conference in Shanghai last month, the boss of a leading Chinese model-maker, MiniMax, predicted inference costs would continue to fall as they have done, by orders of magnitude. Mr Jiang of Yizhi Intelligence says that although Chinese AI development is frustrated by being denied the best foreign models (such as Gemini and GPT), domestic open-source models are improving rapidly. (So rapidly, indeed, that on August 5th OpenAI, the developer of GPT, released its first free and customisable models in years, to compete with Chinese ones.)

Meanwhile, the state is playing a big role, not only by supporting AI development, but also in creating demand. In April, when the leadership convened a study session on AI, Mr Xi talked about making the most of China’s juguo tizhi youshi—its systematic, state-led advantage in mobilising the whole country.

Lower levels of government, used to reading cues from the top and keen to find new areas of economic growth, have embraced the message, often rather keenly. When Rokid, a Hangzhou startup making AI-equipped glasses, submitted an application to the district-level government for a subsidy, 3m yuan ($420,000) appeared in its account within eight minutes. Across China, cities are rushing to offer subsidies for everything from housing to computing power to tailoring open-source models to suit business needs. The state is also an important customer. State museums offer Rokid glasses for tours, while state power workers use them to identify faults along transmission lines.

Meanwhile, provincial and municipal governments have rushed to use DeepSeek to improve hotlines, analyse data and interpret policies for residents. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University, says he has consulted for twice as many government units across China this year compared with last year. They all want to know how to use AI. One example he cites is Beijing’s Haidian district, well-known for its tech universities and businesses, which has deployed AI software to help teachers prepare lessons. Another is Jiangxi province, which wants to integrate AI into its rare-earth and ceramics industries.

Plenty of risks come with the state and investors rushing in. Analysts at Jefferies, an American investment bank, identify enthusiasm for humanoid robots as a bubble in the making. Humanoid robots are part of an “embodied AI” push written into the central government’s work report this year. Local governments are falling over themselves to back them. Yet it may be years before the humanoids can be put to profitable use—if they ever can.

Other applications of AI might carry greater risks than excess capacity. In April Tsinghua researchers asked if the more than 300 Chinese hospitals already using DeepSeek were moving “too fast, too soon” and were in danger of making diagnoses based on false outputs. Last month another group of researchers identified “an urgent need” to ensure that AI was being safely and responsibly deployed at hospitals. The central leadership is growing more aware of the possible pitfalls. Last month Mr Xi named AI, along with computing power and electric vehicles, as areas shown excessive attention by local governments. “Do all provinces have to develop industries in these directions?” The answer is surely “no”. But for now, their involvement is another reason for thinking that China’s AI juggernaut will keep rolling. ■

United States | Lexington

How is Donald Trump putting America first by bashing Brazil?

He isn’t

Illustration: David Simonds

Aug 7th 2025|5 min read

---

On July 17th the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, dispatched a memorandum to America’s diplomats stepping back from a decades-old priority, promoting democracy abroad. Henceforth, he wrote, diplomats should simply congratulate the winning candidate in any country’s election and refrain from “opining” on the fairness of the process, or even on “the democratic values of the country in question”. The change, he wrote, was in keeping with “the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty”.

The president apparently did not get the memo. That same day Donald Trump posted on social media a letter he sent to the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces charges of plotting a coup to overturn an election he lost in 2022. Mr Trump, who identifies with Mr Bolsonaro as a fellow strongman who idolises Donald Trump, bemoaned his “terrible treatment” by “an unjust system”. He went on to attack Brazil’s democratic values, accusing its government of a “ridiculous censorship regime”.

And Mr Trump did not stop at mere opining. About two weeks later, citing the prosecution of Mr Bolsonaro, he imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports. For his part, Mr Rubio invoked the Global Magnitsky Act, which is meant to protect human rights, to impose sanctions on the judge overseeing the case. Mr Rubio was suddenly determined to promote democratic values, and not just in Brazil: “Let this be a warning to those who would trample on the fundamental rights of their countrymen,” he wrote.

Expecting consistency from Mr Trump about policy is, of course, as foolish as expecting modesty about anything. And in the directive about ignoring antidemocratic behaviour, Mr Rubio carved out an exception, saying diplomats could raise objections when “there is a clear and compelling US foreign-policy interest.” It is Mr Trump’s slippery definition of the American interest that makes naming his foreign policy such a challenge for those who have tried to stick a label to it. Is he an isolationist or an interventionist? A hawk or a dove? The answer is yes. “I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” he has observed. Respect for human rights is a vexing issue for him in Brazil, but not in El Salvador, for the same reason that antisemitism can outrage him when it is identified within Harvard University, but not within, say, Kanye West. Principles can be useful as weapons in a thoroughly pragmatic global struggle to punish adversaries and reward acolytes—as distinct from allies—in pursuit of a national interest that has become inseparable from the president’s own interests.

Mr Trump himself has advertised defining themes for his foreign policy that have proved misleading. Take Mr Rubio’s invocation of an “emphasis on national sovereignty”. In a speech to the United Nations in 2018, Mr Trump said he valued sovereignty and independence “above all” and honoured “the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions”. The United States, he said, “will not tell you how to live or work or worship”. Just this May he repeated such assurances in a speech in Saudi Arabia, mocking past “interventionalists” for “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.

Yet no administration in memory has delivered more righteous public lectures, at least to allies, than this one, whether over South Africa’s treatment of its white minority or all Europe’s approach to free speech. Moreover, Mr Trump’s piety about sovereignty is hard to square with his demand for the Panama Canal, not to mention for Canada and Greenland.

Mr Trump’s preferred label for his foreign policy—“America First”—also confuses people. The historical meaning of the term, combined with Mr Trump’s abuse of allies and his scorn for international institutions, has led both admirers and adversaries to view him as an isolationist. He is not. He believes strongly in diplomacy (when he conducts it) and also in unilateral military action (when he is in charge of it). He has not withdrawn American leadership from the world; he has instead declared himself unconstrained to assert that leadership where, when and how he wants.

This is the same way he uses power domestically. He invokes states’ rights when it is convenient for him, as on abortion, but has sent in the National Guard over a governor’s objections when he saw fit, too. When informed in June by the Atlantic that critics such as Tucker Carlson did not consider his support of Israel against Iran to be consistent with “America First”, he replied, “I’m the one that decides that.” After all, he said, he invented the term.

Putting the sovereign in sovereignty

Mr Trump appreciates the power of “weaponised interdependence”, a term coined by two political scientists, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, to describe how America in the 21st century has learned to use networks of finance, trade and even communication as tools of coercion in foreign policy. This is why America’s allies are having such a hard time in the Trump era. As Mr Trump puts his understanding of America’s needs and wants first in every bilateral relationship, he has more leverage to extract concessions from allies than from adversaries. Now, the more a country depends on America, the less dependable America is for it.

In the stand-off with Brazil, Mr Trump is testing how far he can push an independent-minded ally jealous of its own sovereignty, and how far he can stretch his definition of America’s interest. Mr Trump has pointed to bilateral trade deficits as an emergency to justify his other tariffs, but America has run a trade surplus with Brazil for more than ten years. And Brazilian exporters may be able to quickly find new markets for such commodities as beef and coffee, which, unlike orange juice, Mr Trump has not exempted from his tariff. If Americans wind up paying more for hamburgers to help a friend of Donald Trump avoid his day in court, they will be right to wonder who is really being put first. ■

The Americas | Opposition divided

Can Peronists, Argentina’s former masters, stop Javier Milei?

They are in disarray. Hoping that his government fails is their main strategy

Photograph: Getty Images

Jul 28th 2025|BUENOS AIRES|6 min read

---

It has been a bumpy month for President Javier Milei of Argentina. Despite his success in cutting spending, pulling down inflation and even reducing poverty, his government is irritable.

Troubles with the peso are fraying nerves. Having partially floated it in April, the government has kept trying to prop up its value so as to press down on inflation. But that has hampered foreign-reserve accumulation. The government badly missed the reserve targets it agreed to in an imf bail-out in April. That worries investors. The strong peso has also induced spending on imports, creating a current-account deficit. And trying to prop up the peso helped send short-term interest rates soaring dangerously. Despite the government’s efforts, as the supply of dollars dried up at the end of the harvest the peso slid sharply anyway. In July it fell by over 12%.

Concord among normally irreconcilable opposition parties is another headache. On July 10th they passed increases in pensions and disability benefits. Mr Milei vetoed the bill, but the opposition is trying to gather the votes to overrule him. Even if it fails, it has already rattled the government. Mr Milei branded his vice-president, who runs the Senate and oversaw the offending vote on benefits, a “traitor”.

With congressional mid-terms approaching in October, all this is far from ideal. But if the drama is to hurt Mr Milei in those elections, or beyond, the opposition will need a modicum of credibility. Instead, it has looked punch-drunk since Mr Milei won the presidency in 2023 as an angry libertarian outsider. Its recent show of organisation is the exception, not the rule.

Moderate alternatives seem doomed. The centre-right Republican Proposal (PRO) party, run by a former president, Mauricio Macri, was obliterated by Mr Milei’s Liberty Advances party in elections in May in the city of Buenos Aires, normally a PRO stronghold. Unable to beat Mr Milei, the PRO has joined him. It hopes an alliance with Liberty Advances in elections for Buenos Aires province in September and in the congressional mid-terms will let it survive. It may well simply become irrelevant. The contest between Mr Milei and Peronism, the amorphous populist movement that dominated Argentine politics for 80 years, is deeply polarised. Third parties like the PRO may be squeezed out.

But the Peronists are in disarray, too. Just 29% of Argentines say they will vote for them in the mid-terms, and nearly 40% plan to vote for Liberty Advances. In June the Supreme Court upheld a six-year sentence for corruption for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a former president who leads the movement. She is under house arrest and barred from public office. The decision prompted a show of outraged unity among Peronists, yet in reality they are still deeply divided. Ms Fernández may aspire to copy Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who was jailed for corruption, but got his conviction annulled and won power again. But this is unlikely. If she did leave national politics, it might ultimately help the Peronists: though she has a devoted core of supporters, she also carries some weighty baggage.

Other leading Peronists include Máximo Kirchner, Ms Fernández’s son; Axel Kicillof, the governor of Buenos Aires province; and Sergio Massa, economy minister in the previous government. None excites voters. All come from Buenos Aires, so they may struggle to win support in the rural interior, which contains Mr Milei’s firmest supporters, especially young men. Mr Massa has already lost to Mr Milei once, in the presidential run-off in 2023. Three-quarters of Argentines dislike Mr Kirchner, according to a recent opinion poll. Mr Kicillof’s job gives him a high profile but he is dogged by his involvement in the sloppy nationalisation in 2012 of YPF, the country’s largest energy company, when he was Ms Fernández’s economy minister.

All three have endorsed a joint Peronist platform and candidate lists for the upcoming elections for the province of Buenos Aires, but the process of reaching agreement was slow and painful, and repeatedly nearly collapsed. Messrs Kicillof and Kirchner do not get on. Juan Grabois, a hard-leftist in a leather jacket who ran in the Peronists’ presidential primary in 2023, stayed out of negotiations. All bar Mr Grabois are now trying to agree on joint lists for the mid-terms. Each faction hopes the coming elections will demonstrate their might and help crush internal rivals before the next presidential election in 2027.

The movement has barely started to discuss its difficulties. “We are like a sick man who won’t go to the doctor,” says Fernando Navarro, who served in the last Peronist government. Some Peronists think they moved too far to the left; others say they have lost touch with the poor. Few mention their chaotic economic record. Nor do they agree on style. Mr Grabois says they must be as aggressive as Mr Milei, who swears incessantly and insults and threatens rivals and journalists, calling them “eunuch donkeys” among other things. By contrast, someone close to Mr Massa says the opposition should be “firm but not rude”. There is little focus on ideas. “We either repeat phrases from [Juan] Perón from 50 years ago…or we snipe at colleagues,” says Mr Navarro.

One good reason for the Peronists to worry is the sense that Argentine attitudes have profoundly changed. In 2011 some 70% of Argentines “wanted to live in a country where most things are done by the state rather than the private sector”, according to Isonomía, a pollster. By 2024 that number had fallen to 42%. Some Peronists are starting to echo the libertarian, anti-statist Mr Milei. “It’s true that fiscal balance should be a golden rule,” says the person close to Mr Massa.

The leading Peronists will highlight unemployment and shrinking state pensions, but for now their main strategy is just to hope that Mr Milei stumbles dramatically before 2027. A crisis triggered by a volatile exchange rate is not unimaginable. Yet voters who tire of Mr Milei may simply stay at home—or look for another new face. That could open the door to an ambitious provincial governor. Those from different political parties have a history of working in concert to oppose the presidency. Keep an eye on Martín Llaryora of Córdoba and Maximiliano Pullaro of Santa Fe, says Ana Iparraguirre of GBAO, a pollster. The pair, along with several other governors, recently announced a new nationwide political alliance for the mid-term elections.

For his part, Mr Milei is furious at the opposition for trying to increase spending. He says he will reimpose his spending cuts “after we crush them”. But Mr Milei must work with the opposition after the mid-terms, whatever the outcome. Just a third of the seats in the Senate and half of those in the lower house are up for grabs, and he has only a few lawmakers now. That makes his scorched-earth approach risky. For a chance to truly crush the opposition, he must wait for the general election in 2027. His own job will be on the line then, too. ■

Middle East & Africa | Flying low

Why it’s a pain to take a plane in Africa

Bad connections, high fees and strict visa rules hamper travel around the continent

Photograph: Reuters

Aug 7th 2025|Lagos-Accra-Freetown|4 min read

---

Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, is as far from Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub, as Berlin is from Athens. But whereas a round-trip ticket for the three-hour flight from the German capital to the Greek one can be had for around €150 ($173), getting from Lagos to Freetown took your correspondent two flights, a ferry and almost $2,000. The trip included a seven-hour layover in Ghana and required changing from a Nigerian to a Togolese airline. The cheaper option, albeit longer by 20 hours, would have been to fly across the continent to Ethiopia before taking another plane west towards Sierra Leone.

The journey is illustrative of much air travel in Africa. In a massive continent that contains 16 landlocked countries, planes should be an obvious way of getting around. Yet flying between African countries is an ordeal. Passengers and non-human cargo alike have to contend with terrible connections, sky-high prices, and hostile visa rules and customs regulations. That hampers the exchange of goods, people and ideas.

Much like other African infrastructure, the continent’s poor air connections are both a symptom and a cause of its poverty. Few Africans can afford to fly, so for airlines it is not worth offering many connections. Even though nearly a fifth of the world’s people live on the continent, it accounts for just 2% of air travellers. Those who can pay for tickets tend to travel outside the continent rather than within it. In 2023 only 28% of flights run by African airlines were to other African countries, whereas 80% of flights by European airlines were within Europe. Even so, flights within Africa operated at just 76% capacity on average, the lowest in any region.

A lack of competition begets poor service quality. Fusty national carriers dominate the market. Their fleets and their safety records are better than they used to be. But they charge high prices, both because they frequently have a monopoly on a particular route and because they have to hedge against currency movements and compensate for limited access to credit.

Governments are making things more unpleasant. Not all go as far as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which recently banned Air France from serving their countries, making them even harder to reach. But most are cash-strapped and see their travelling citizens as a source of revenue. Average air taxes in Africa are twice those in the richer Middle East. Nigerian travellers pay an average of $180 in tax on every international trip; those in Gabon and Sierra Leone have to fork out around $300. In Freetown, simply leaving the airport costs an additional $25. The African Union’s plan for a more liberalised, single air-transport market has not got off the ground.

The joy of flying around the continent is further dampened by Byzantine visa rules. Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian entrepreneur and Africa’s richest man, has complained about visa requirements that render business travel at short notice all but impossible. Less than a third of trips around the continent are visa-free for Africans; getting the right permit is both expensive and can take weeks, if it comes through at all.

All this makes it much harder to move goods and people. Africa-themed conferences are frequently held in the Gulf. A Tanzanian and a Senegalese who want to do business can meet more conveniently in Doha than in Dar es Salaam or Dakar. Cargo that might be flown across vast distances instead has to travel for days on terrible roads, crossing many borders.

There is some hope for African flyers. Thanks to Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways, flying in east Africa is already smoother than getting around the west or across the continent. Yet there is progress even in west Africa. Ivory Coast wants to become a travel hub, with its state airline adding more routes. Happily for your correspondent, Sierra Leone’s flag carrier recently started flights to Lagos. Qatar Airways is eyeing a stake in RwandAir that could help it expand in central Africa. If that helps African countries close the gaps between each other, they may yet make progress on closing the gap between the continent and the rest of the world. ■

Europe | Tapping out

Why the Germans are falling out of love with beer

In the land of biergartens and Oktoberfest, Helles increasingly for other people

Photograph: AP

Aug 7th 2025|BERLIN|2 min read

---

SUMMON THE idea of the German at play, and chances are you see a rosy-cheeked Lederhosen- or Dirndl-clad youngster bearing half a dozen overflowing steins of beer. Never mind that—as the rest of Germany will hasten to remind you—you have taken Bavaria as a synecdoche for the entire country. The real problem with this image is that Germans are losing their taste for the tipple that once defined them.

On August 1st Germany’s statistical office announced that in the first half of 2025, six-month beer sales had fallen below 4bn litres for the first time since it began counting in 1993. In 2005 the median German quaffed 112 litres of the stuff. The figure is now less than 90. Germany remains the sixth-biggest beer market in the world. But whereas Germans once downed more than anyone bar the insatiable Czechs, they are now eighth in the per-person league table. Worse, the decline is gathering pace. “Panic” has gripped some breweries, says Gerrit Blümelhuber, a consultant.

Chart: The Economist

Some of the culprits are familiar: Germany is ageing, and younger folk are less keen on booze. Some blame cost, though that seems hard to square with the €15 ($17.40) Kisten (crates) of Paulaner on supermarket shelves. Struggles in hotels and restaurants point to a broader hospitality problem. And yet the decline in wine-drinking is much gentler. “There is a noticeable thirst for beer in Germany,” says Volker Kuhl, ceo of the C&A Veltins brewery, but “no desire for a third or fourth glass”.

If there is a glimmer in the glass it is the booming non-alcoholic sector, which now accounts for almost one-tenth of beer brewed in Germany (though it is excluded from official statistics). Rare is the Biergarten without an alkoholfrei offer; last year Munich saw its first devoted solely to boozeless brews. Germany’s sometimes-staid Braumeister are trying new techniques like using wild yeasts that do not ferment all the sugar in the brewing process. But Germany’s storied purity law, which limits what can be marketed as beer, is not always an invitation to innovate, warns Markus Raupach of the German Beer Academy.

Even in the brightest forecasts, non-alcoholic beer cannot possibly compensate for the decline in the boozy sort. Nor can exports, which are dwindling even more quickly than domestic sales and now face Donald Trump’s tariffs. Nearly 100 German breweries have closed in the past five years; more will surely follow. A sobering thought. ■

International | The Telegram

How to write laws of war for a wicked world

The post-1945 order is crumbling. History offers a glimpse of alternatives that might work

Illustration: Chloe Cushman

Aug 5th 2025|5 min read

---

WHEN lists are compiled of great military commanders, Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden’s king from 1611 to 1632, is often near the top. Innovation and daring were his watchwords, and had to be. Aged 16 when he took the throne, he inherited a realm embroiled in three separate wars. Sweden has “no friends” and “all our neighbours are our enemies”, the teenage king bleakly wrote.

It was a fearful, blood-soaked time. Institutions that once claimed universal moral authority—notably the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—were crumbling under assault from Protestant rulers and rebels. To survive this age of disorder the young king put his faith in the new. Leading his own armies into the field (and eventually dying in battle), he vanquished stronger opponents with the help of advanced weapons and fast-moving mobile tactics, prompting some historians to dub him “the father of modern warfare”. He took new-fangled ideas into combat, too. By the grim standards of his day, Gustavus Adolphus stood out for the strict discipline and (relative) martial restraint that he imposed on his troops. In this, no papal edict guided Sweden’s king, a Protestant intent on making his country one of Europe’s great powers. Instead he was following both his conscience and arguments set out in a work that—it is said—he kept under his pillow while on campaign: “On the Law of War and Peace”. This remarkable treatise was published in 1625 by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch lawyer, historian and poet. For more than a century, Grotius has been hailed as “the father of international law”, for setting out detailed, universal rules to determine when wars are just and lawful.

Strange to say, the image of an ambitious warrior-king studying Grotius in his tent should offer some comfort four centuries later. Once again the world is entering an age of disorder. Multilateral institutions founded after the second world war, from the United Nations to international courts that hear charges of crimes against humanity, are losing their authority. The final fate of the post-1945 system will not be known for some time. That is no reason to wait, resignedly, for the world to slide into anarchy and unconstrained violence. If new arguments are needed to limit harms committed by men of violence, the past is a good place to look.

The Telegram has praised Grotius before, and makes no apologies for revisiting his wisdom now. He stands out for his ability to craft arguments that appeal to the powerful, reflecting his own contacts with kings and their counsellors as a diplomatic envoy. He also worked at an important turning-point in intellectual thought. Medieval theologians and church leaders focused on lawful and unlawful reasons for going to war. Sovereigns and soldiers fighting “just” wars faced few limits on their conduct, while opponents without justice on their side had no inherent right to use force at all. But a problem lurked in that approach. Grotius lived at a time of brutal, often sectarian wars, in which all sides were sure they had God’s blessing and were fighting for a just cause. He offered a solution. During a war, he wrote, identical rights and obligations should apply to each belligerent, who should fight as if they were upholding justice. That advanced his real aim: the crafting of laws to govern the conduct of war.

Grotius would have been startled by such modern bodies as the International Criminal Court, which claim the right to haul errant generals or political leaders into the dock. Outsiders are ill-qualified to judge the limits of just war or self-defence, he wrote, calling it “altogether preferable” to leave such decisions “to the scruples of the belligerents rather than to have recourse to the judgments of others”. He believed that necessity could justify harsh acts, such as bombarding a besieged city. That did not make him an apologist for war crimes. Acts which do not hasten a war’s end can never be justified, he counselled, including rape and the wanton killing of women and children. Crucially, he argued that using gratuitous and reckless cruelty, for instance during the taking of cities and towns, is both morally repugnant and also counter-productive. Instead he urged “moderation” and the sparing of all enemy property not needed for the war effort, as well as precious assets such as fruit trees used for food. In his telling such forbearance is wise because it avoids inducing “despair” in an enemy, which can be turned into a “great weapon” against an attacker.

A man of his time, Grotius applied different standards to European and non-European rulers. Critics grumble that he used his legal skills as an apologist for colonial expansion by the Dutch East India Company. Still, his moral arguments about the laws of war rested on universal foundations. People are social beings, he said, with such a “desire for society” that their love for humanity trumps the selfish pursuit of advantage seen among lesser beasts.

When flawed rules are better than no laws

For good or ill, self-interest has inspired rules regulating violence for millennia. In her fine book “The Rule of Laws: A 4,000 Year Quest to Order the World”, Fernanda Pirie, a professor of the anthropology of law at Oxford University, writes that the biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye” is not a demand for revenge. It is, she suggests, a law designed to define the limits of acceptable retaliation, with clear echoes in still-older Mesopotamian legal codes that also sought to prevent blood feuds from escalating. Her book notes how ancient rulers sought legitimacy by writing laws. The oldest laws found by archaeologists, dating from 2112BC, were proclaimed by Ur-Namma, an “ambitious military leader” who had just toppled a ruthless warlord. “I did not deliver the orphan to the rich. I did not deliver the widow to the mighty,” he is said to have boasted.

This is not to say that ancient honour codes are a substitute for the Geneva Conventions. It is an appeal to be practical. To protect the weak, convince the strong that rules serve them, too. ■

Business | Schumpeter

McDonald’s secret sauce—plus a pickle or two

Hearty quarterly results conceal a dual challenge for the burger behemoth

Photograph: Brett Ryder

Aug 7th 2025|5 min read

---

THE success of the Golden Arches rests on three simple, sturdy foundations: a menu of reliably decent grub, at a decent price, shored up by catchy marketing. Ever since it went public in 1965, McDonald’s has done best whenever it stuck to this original blueprint. When one or more of these pillars crumbles, the fast-food fortress looks shaky. A quarter of a century ago this led to a near-collapse. Overly rapid expansion in the number of outlets and, at the same time, of products on offer made it harder for burger-flippers to keep up, hurting reliability. A price war with Burger King turned downright indecent. And the ads were stale, too. The result was acid reflux for investors. Between late 1999 and early 2003 the company shed two-thirds of its market value.

The wobble in the first six months of 2024 was mild by comparison. But it still made investors nauseous. McDonald’s shares lost 16% of their value between January and July, their worst half-yearly run since the global financial crisis of 2007-09. This time the wonky pillar was affordability, especially in America. Post-pandemic inflation had pushed average McDonald’s prices up by 40% from 2019. Videos of $18 Big Mac combos went viral. The company’s own forgettable marketing efforts did not.

Realising its mistake, in July 2024 McDonald’s launched a $5 meal deal, comprising a burger, fries, nuggets and a fizzy drink. In January it packaged this together with a “buy one, add one for $1” offer and digital-only promotions in its app, which it called the McValue menu. McValue’s memorable face is John Cena, a beefy wrestler turned Hollywood superstar. In another marketing coup, in March and April diners ate up Minecraft Movie Meals, promoted in collaboration with the video-game-inspired blockbuster, so fast that the included collectibles ran out a fortnight into the weeks-long campaign. A food-safety snafu affecting outlets in 14 states in October proved mercifully short-lived.

All this has worked a treat. On August 6th McDonald’s unveiled hearty results for the second quarter. Revenue, derived primarily from the licence fees, royalties and rents which franchise operators hand over to headquarters in Chicago, rose by 5%, year on year, to $6.8bn. The preferred industry measure of same-store sales increased by 3.8% globally and 2.5% in America, a big improvement on four consecutive quarters of no growth or worse. McDonald’s operating margin, already the industry’s envy, topped 47% for only the fourth time in the company’s history.

Investors are lovin’ it, sending McDonald’s market value up by 3% after the earnings announcement, to $221bn. They are certainly preferrin’ it to its fast-food rivals. The day before, Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, saw its stock slip after its latest results came in less than finger-lickin’ good. Those of Shake Shack and Chipotle, slightly fancier “fast-casual” chains, crashed by a fifth in the past month after each reported fewer takers for their burgers and burritos as middle-class American diners stayed away amid mounting uncertainty over the health of the world’s biggest economy.

As the earlier meagre quarters showed, McDonald’s is not unshakeable. But aspects of its business model do allow it to withstand recent shocks better than its competitors.

Take tariffs, which President Donald Trump is slapping on trading partners left and right. Given that America imports lots of food, from Brazilian beef to Colombian coffee, these levies are bound to raise restaurants’ costs. In the case of Chipotle, which runs all its own outlets, or Shake Shack, which operates 329 of its 579 eateries, tariffs result in a direct hit to the bottom line. For McDonald’s, these costs are borne by franchisees, who manage 95% of its 13,500 American stores (and a similar share of its 30,000 or so foreign outposts).

Since their payments to McDonald’s are a function of sales rather than profits, franchise operators’ margins can shrink without necessarily hurting the brand owner’s earnings. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, calculates that it would take cost inflation of 7.5% for McDonald’s to feel any hit to net profit, and then only of about 1%. A cost increase of just 2.5% would dent Chipotle’s net profit by 4% and Shake Shack’s by 9%.

For less global rivals the tariff pain is compounded by a weaker dollar, the result of Mr Trump’s chaotic economic stewardship, which makes imports dearer still. McDonald’s, by contrast, peddles burgers in over 100 countries and earns 60% of its revenues in other currencies, compared with 43% for Yum! Brands, 3% for Shake Shack and 2% for Chipotle. A softer greenback boosts the dollar value of these foreign sales.

A premature McFlurry of excitement?

Yummy, indeed. Still, as investors digest the good news, they should consider two potential snags. First, McDonald’s frugal menu disproportionately attracts lower-income consumers. These diners, as the company’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, admitted on the latest earnings call, continue to feel “a lot of anxiety and unease”. Rather than eat out, some are opting for groceries, notes Dennis Geiger of UBS, a bank. Diners with fatter wallets may prefer rival joints such as Chili’s, which offers a starter, main and drink for $10.99—and has waiters. McDonald’s risks ending up too pricey for the poor and not posh enough for the less so.

Keeping prices in check is, then, vital. Yet so is keeping franchisees happy. These two imperatives are in tension. Franchise operators are permitted to set their own prices—which explains why a Big Mac will set you back $4.36 (the same in today’s dollars as the 45 cents the first one cost in 1967) in Austin but $7.06 in Seattle. Urging them to flog McValue menus may squeeze them to breaking point, especially as their costs balloon. McDonald’s may be in a sweet spot right now. But this doesn’t mean things can’t sour. ■

Business | Bartleby

How to greet people at work

Max Flannel, our office agony uncle, answers a bulging postbag on a vital subject

Photograph: Paul Blow

Aug 7th 2025|4 min read

---

Dear Max, At the start of virtual meetings, should I say hello to everyone? It seems to absorb a lot of time, but I don’t want to be unfriendly.

Virtual calls put the hell in hello. Every greeting prompts other participants to spend ages unmuting before saying “hello” back. Some people then ask “how is everyone?”, forcing everyone to unmute again and say something wildly insightful like “fine”. By the time that’s over, someone else has joined the call and the whole cycle starts again. Use the rule of three. If there are three or more other people already on the line, just wave.

I am a germophobe and hate shaking hands with people. I pine for the days of the pandemic, when no one touched each other at all. What do you advise?

Your best bet is to wear a mask: there’s no more cost-effective way to get people to keep their hands to themselves. You could also ask your employer if you could work from home, or from an iron lung. If that is a step too far, you could do that pandemic-era thing of extending the point of your elbow towards people, and hope they will reciprocate. But what made some sense then looks weird now: like you don’t know what those things at the end of your arms are for, or have been in a coma for five years.

I suffer from anxiety over how to greet people, particularly those I know a bit but not well. I spent some time in Japan in my youth, and to avoid deciding whether to hug someone or not, I stop before I get within touching distance and bow. It’s amazing how often people will bow back. Is this a sensible strategy?

It depends a bit on whether you are still in Japan. But the pre-emptive greeting is a good tactic wherever you are. Another variant of this approach is to do a lot of performative stuff as you get close to someone: saying hello loudly, waving madly and smiling like an idiot. Stop about two metres short of the other person, well out of range, and if necessary keep waving and saying hello for a bit. If you are in a meeting room, move quickly to the other side of the table as you wave. If you appear to be unhinged but extremely friendly, you will have hit the right mark. No other greeting will be needed.

I don’t know how to greet female colleagues I have worked with for years. I could shake hands with them, as I do with other men, but it seems a little formal. Do you have any advice?

This question is one of the ones I get most often, at least from people in America and western Europe. The classic advice is to shake hands with everyone, regardless of how well you know them. It works as a greeting between men, so should work as a greeting between sexes, too. If you want to add a bit of familiarity, use both hands to project extra warmth. Imagine you are a political leader after signing a peace treaty.

But there are times when handshaking feels genuinely awkward: when you see a close colleague socially, for example. My advice in these circumstances is never to be the first mover: wait and see what the other person does and match them. The risk is that you sacrifice some agency, and end up in an unwanted clinch. But at least you didn’t start it.

I was recently involved in an unfortunate hugging incident at work. I got my timing and targeting all wrong, and ended up with the other person’s ear lobe in my mouth. Where did I go wrong, and what should I have done?

If you do end up at close quarters, remember that an embrace at work is not meant to be an actual embrace, just a faint echo of one. If you are hugging someone, behave as though you are playing that children’s game called “Operation”. Put your arm around the other person without actually touching any part of their body. Keep your face well away from theirs: unless they have unusually big ear lobes, you should never find yourself in that kind of horrendous situation again.

In a recent cheek-kissing greeting, we did not agree on the number of head movements and I ended up with the other person’s nose in my mouth. What should I have done?

You could count down out loud. But I notice that this comes from the same address as the lobe-eater. Since you seem unusually prone to nibbling your colleagues, please just approach everyone with your hand already fully extended for a handshake. You should look like a Dalek. Write in and let me know how you get on. I’ll be back with another postbag later in the year. ■

Finance & economics | Buttonwood

Want better returns? Forget risk. Focus on fear

A recent study suggests a new paradigm for asset pricing

Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

Aug 6th 2025|4 min read

---

An investor will take on more risk only if they expect higher returns in compensation. The idea is a cornerstone of financial theory. Yet look around today and you have to wonder. Risks to growth—whether from fraught geopolitics or vast government borrowing—are becoming ever-more fearsome. Meanwhile, stockmarkets across much of the world are at or within touching distance of record highs. In America and Europe, the extra yield from buying high-risk corporate bonds instead of government debt is close to its narrowest in over a decade. Speculative manias rage around everything from cryptocurrencies and meme stocks to Pokémon cards.

A common explanation for effervescent markets is that investors have become reckless or outright irrational. Or perhaps the relationship between risk and return simply is not there, posits a working paper by Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates, an investment firm, and Edward McQuarrie of Santa Clara University. They argue that over the past two-and-a-bit centuries, risk (as conventionally defined) has done a lousy job of explaining the relative returns of stocks and bonds. In its place, they propose fear—a more complex thing—as the real driving force of markets.

Standard portfolio theory says a stock’s uncertain future returns are distributed along a bell curve. The expected return lies under the peak, and risk is equivalent to the curve’s variance, or spread. These assumptions make the maths elegant and, more important, tractable. But they are also flawed. Stock returns do not in fact follow a bell curve: they take extreme values too often and are asymmetric. Investors, meanwhile, do not regard the curve’s full spread as risky, but just the side of it corresponding to losses. Who, however risk-averse, would be upset by an outsize return?

What is more, risk theory gives an inadequate account of historical returns. A core prediction is the “equity risk premium”, meaning the tendency of stocks, being riskier, to deliver better long-term returns than government bonds. To test this, Mr McQuarrie compiled American stock and bond prices going back to 1793, using data from newspaper archives. Previous studies had seemed to establish the equity risk premium as a persistent, relatively stable property of markets; his new database calls that into question.

An investor who bought American stocks in 1804 would have had to wait 97 years before their return beat that of bonds. By 1933 they would have fallen behind again. A statistical test of the relationship between variance and return, over the database’s full timespan, failed even to find a “modest or inconstant” risk premium. The cumulative equity risk premium (up to 2023) has nevertheless been large. But 70% of it came from an exceptional period between 1950 and 1999; the rest of the time, stocks’ relative performance was middling or poor. And these, after all, were results for one of the world’s best-performing stockmarkets. Other researchers have shown that, since 1900, those of other countries have on average returned far less.

Realised variance and returns contain both expected and unexpected elements, so no theory is likely to match the data perfectly. Even so, the scale of these departures from what risk theory would predict, over such a long timespan, warrants a search for a new framework. Messrs Arnott and McQuarrie propose that instead of pricing assets by their variance, investors price them according to two fears: fear of loss (FOL) and fear of missing out (FOMO). Whereas risk is measured by variance, FOL refers only to its downside (or “semivariance”). An asset inspires FOMO if it has the chance of wild, unexpected gains that those shunning it might miss. This is measured by the “skewness”, or asymmetry, of its return distribution.

Rather than working through fear theory’s maths, which they admit is formidable, the authors hope to tempt others to investigate it with them. They might just succeed. As well as being a widespread, often rational impulse, FOMO helps explain why people would buy overpriced stocks, or even speculative assets with no fundamental source of returns. Its absence from conventional theory seems like an error. And FOL describes how people actually think of risk far better than variance does. Just like investors’ mood and market dynamics, the balance between the two can vary dramatically with time and circumstance. The historical record suggests that portfolio theory needs some new ideas. Fear might be just the thing. ■

Finance & economics | Free exchange

An economist’s guide to big life decisions

Forget your trip to the dentist. A new check-up is required

Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

Aug 7th 2025|5 min read

---

Time for your annual check-up. After what feels like an eternity in the waiting room, flicking through dog-eared copies of the world’s finest publications (did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads?), your name is called at last. A smiling professional awaits you, only this time the room smells not of disinfectant, but of the solvents used in whiteboard markers. Instead of a fold-out bed, there is a Bloomberg terminal behind the modesty curtain in the corner, flashing green or red with every tick of the market. The economist will see you now.

Economists should behave in a manner that would lead the public to think of them as “humble, competent people” akin to dentists, wrote John Maynard Keynes, a not-very-humble economist. If they could get the public to see the profession as being on a similar level to their white-coated peers, he wrote, that would be a “splendid thing”. Keynes was referring more to a technocratic consensus about how to run the economy, rather than to the sort of personalised care and attention provided by a medical professional. But what if the profession took his idea both seriously and literally? Could a trip to the economist make your life better?

On arrival, the first question is what seems to be the matter: income or happiness? The good news is that more money should make you jollier. Although economists once worried there was a point at which gains to emotional well-being from higher incomes plateaued—a study in 2010 pegged it at $75,000 ($110,000 today)—research by Matthew Killingsworth of the University of Pennsylvania has overturned this idea. He finds that for all but a small minority, well-being typically increases along with income, and that there is no upper limit to the trend. Modern economic research therefore confirm‎s that Kingsley Amis, a British novelist, was correct when he wrote there is “no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones”. But even if there was a point at which more money did not make you happier, the vast majority of an economist’s patients would still benefit from earning more in other, non-happiness-related ways. Better the economist focuses on the tangible and leaves the transcendental to the priest.

With many patients, the economist might take a look at their chart and tut, “I wouldn’t start from here.” A person’s place of birth has the biggest impact on their life outcomes. The 83% of the world’s population who live in non-rich countries hold a bad hand. At least the prescription is simple: move if you can. Returns to migration are sky-high. A paper in 2016 by Michael Clemens, then at the Centre for Global Development, Claudio Montenegro of the World Bank and Lant Pritchett, then of Harvard University, calculated the benefits of moving from the poor world to America for a typical 30-year-old man with a secondary education. They came to $14,000 or so a year, adjusting for the different price levels. Such benefits are also likely to be passed down to any offspring. Indeed, the puzzle among economists is why so few people move rather than so many. (Border fences explain only so much.)

The rest of the advice will depend on how old you are and what has already gone wrong. A handful of big decisions—whether to go to university and what to study, what career you pursue, whether to start a family and with whom—matter more than others. A college education is usually a good bet. In 2020 the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a British think-tank, found that, after accounting for individual characteristics and taxation, university leads to a typical bump of 20% in lifetime earnings. But the returns depend on what you study: entrants to creative-arts courses can expect no financial benefits. Male medics and economists both enjoy a lifetime wage increase of around £500,000 ($625,000).

An economist should point out that, although wages do vary widely between occupations, a rising share of the variation is explained not only by what you do but by the company for which you work. Best, then, to get a job at a superstar employer. Unionised companies may pay more than their non-unionised counterparts, but if you are a high-flyer you might want to opt for the latter. Unions tend to ensure that low performers get paid more while high performers get paid less. When it comes to relationships, later marriages are typically more stable, but much of this is what an economist might call a “selection effect”. The timing of marriage has little effect in itself—instead, the pattern reflects the type of person who waits for just the right partner. Research also suggests that it may be better to delay having children, and in this case it might not be a selection effect: the later a woman’s career break, the smaller the impact on her lifetime earnings.

For older patients, the economist has less advice. Saving for retirement is more valuable the earlier you start. The economist might get out their whiteboard markers for an impromptu refresher on compound interest for youngsters. Older folk do not have much time to improve their earning power, so they should focus on becoming happier instead. Loneliness is the big risk. Perhaps a second degree in the creative arts could help?

Nine out of ten wonks recommend...

All of this comes with a caveat: economic research tends to deal in averages. Much of the advice will be generic, rather than tailored to the individual. So, too, is a dentist’s: brush your teeth, floss regularly, avoid sugar and do not smoke. But the dentist at least can carry out remedial work and fix things after they have gone wrong. The economist has few tools to fill in career gaps or polish a grubby CV. They can provide some helpful guidance to those who lose their jobs—retraining is helpful but think carefully about the precise course; if the whole region is suffering then those who move earlier are likely to suffer the least—but little in the way of direct help. To live up to Keynes’s metaphor, economists need more than data. They need drills. ■

Science & technology | Cosmic horror

Astronomers cannot agree on how fast the universe is expanding

This suggests cosmology might be wrong about something fundamental

Photograph: NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab), A. Pagan (STScI)

Aug 6th 2025|7 min read

---

IT IS ONE of the biggest mysteries in cosmology—and getting bigger all the time. Ever since Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, published observations of distant galaxies in 1929, scientists have known that the universe is expanding. For almost 30 years they have known that the expansion is accelerating (that discovery, made in 1998, was honoured with a Nobel prize in 2011). What they cannot agree on, though, is how fast it is currently growing.

That present-day rate of expansion is known as the Hubble constant. Measure it one way, and it comes to around 73 kilometres per second per megaparsec (km/s/mpc; a megaparsec is the distance travelled by light in about 3.3m years, and a value of 73 means that objects 1mpc away recede from an observer at 73 kilometres per second). But measure it another way and the answer is closer to 67km/s/mpc.

That cosmologists cannot agree on one of the most elementary facts about the universe is striking enough. But that uncertainty produces others, too: it makes it impossible to calculate an exact age for the universe, for one thing, or to be certain of its exact size. And the discrepancy refuses to go away, no matter how many times astronomers re-check their measurements, upgrade their instruments, or think of new ways to attack the problem.

The Hubble tension, as the discrepancy between the two sets of measurements is known, “has got stronger every year for the past decade”, says Dan Scolnic, an astronomer at Duke University, in North Carolina. Some astronomers think one set of measurements or the other will turn out to be wrong. Others believe that the tension is a hint of deeper problems with the scientific description of the universe, known as the standard model of cosmology.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to work out the Hubble constant. One involves measuring the modern universe directly, working out how far away distant galaxies are and how quickly they are receding. It is this technique that gives the higher value of 73. The second is to look at the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), an aftershock of the Big Bang. The CMB reflects the large-scale structure of the early universe. Given those starting conditions, astronomers can crank the handle on their cosmological models to predict how fast the universe should be expanding today. This kind of work is where the figure of 67 comes from.

So which is correct? One possibility is that astronomers in the first camp are getting their measurements of the modern universe wrong. The speed with which distant galaxies are receding is relatively straightforward to measure. Just as the pitch of an ambulance’s siren appears to change as it approaches and then speeds away, light emitted by galaxies will have longer wavelengths—and so appear redder—the faster they are receding. For that reason, it is measurements of distances that come in for the most scrutiny.

Distance measurements on galactic scales are notoriously tricky. The most common method is to combine several different techniques into something called the cosmic distance ladder, in which the farthest object measurable by one technique is used to calibrate the next. The lowest rungs are nearby stars, Earth’s distance from which can be measured by trigonometry. Higher rungs are formed by what astronomers call standard candles—stars known as Cepheid variables, for example, or certain supernovae—whose absolute brightness is known, and whose distance can therefore be inferred by how dim or bright they appear from Earth.

There are plenty of subtleties that can skew such measurements, says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, who specialises in measuring the Hubble constant. Interstellar dust absorbs light in some wavelengths more than others, which has to be corrected for. The “metallicity” of individual Cepheids—astronomer-speak for the degree to which they contain elements other than hydrogen and helium—can influence their brightness. The specific kind of supernovae needed for distance measurements are relatively uncommon, so the sample used for distance measurements is rather small. Extraordinary claims, says Dr Freedman—such as the idea that two sets of bulletproof measurements disagree with each other—require extraordinary evidence. But the evidence so far, she says, is not quite extraordinary enough.

Others take the opposite view. “I think the idea that these measurements are wrong was more viable a few years ago,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (and one of the winners of that 2011 Nobel). As more astronomers have become interested in the Hubble tension, they have cross-checked the distance ladder measurements in other ways. Every rung has been double-checked using different standard candles, says Dr Riess, and yet the tension persists.

A paper published in June further complicated matters. It did not rely on a distance ladder of any sort. Instead it examined beams of light from bright astronomical objects called quasars. If a massive object lies between the source of that light and Earth, its gravitational effects will cause different beams of light to take different amounts of time to travel to Earth. Examining those differences lets astronomers work out how far the beams have travelled. The method came up with a value of the Hubble constant very similar to studies that rely on the old-fashioned distance ladder. That means, says Dr Riess, that if some unknown confounder is throwing off the distance measurements, it would have to be throwing off several fundamentally different sorts of measurements at once.

Some astronomers, therefore, think it is the early-universe technique that is at fault. The worry here is less about erroneous readings—the CMB has been measured and re-measured with increasing accuracy by a string of satellites since the 1990s, as well as ground-based telescopes in Chile and at the South Pole, all of which agree. The suspicion is rather that something may be wrong with the cosmological theory into which those measurements are fed.

That theory, called Lambda-CDM (LCDM) holds that the visible portion of the universe—galaxies, planets, starlight and the rest—makes up just 5% of the total. The remainder is supposedly split between “dark energy”, a force that opposes gravity at long distances and which drives the expansion of the universe (the “lambda” in LCDM), and “dark matter”, which cannot be seen but whose presence can be inferred from its gravitational effects on galaxies (CDM stands for “cold dark matter”).

LCDM might be counterintuitive. But it is very successful at predicting everything from the abundance of simple chemical elements to the distribution of galaxies and patterns within the CMB, all with high precision. Replacing it with something that is equally good but which can also predict a Hubble constant in line with present-day measurements is a tall mathematical order.

Still, there is no shortage of candidates. Some speculate that dark energy’s potency might change over time. That would mean that attempts to model today’s universe from the CMB—which assume that the nature of dark energy has not changed since the Big Bang—have been misguided. A paper presented at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society last month suggested that the Milky Way might sit within a giant, comparatively empty region of space, which would make the Hubble constant appear larger than it really is.

For now none of these theories has knocked LCDM off its perch. Astronomy, then, is at an impasse. It is possible that some inspired theoretician will emerge tomorrow with an idea that can solve the problem. Failing that, astronomers must fall back on the hope that yet more data will provide some vital clue. A string of new telescopes, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile or the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to fly no later than May 2027, may offer a vital insight. But if the past few decades are any guide, they are as likely to simply re-confirm‎ the Hubble tension as they are to resolve it. ■

Science & technology | Well Informed

Should you take collagen?

There are simpler ways to get smoother skin and stronger joints

Illustration: Cristina Spanò

Aug 1st 2025|3 min read

---

WOULD YOU pay £40 ($53) for some powder made from the ground-up, chemically processed skin, bones and connective tissues of cows or fish? Marketed that way, perhaps not. But stick it in a bottle labelled supplementary collagen, and things might start to look more appealing. Collagen supplements are in vogue, taken both by athletes (who hope for stronger, more injury-resistant joints and ligaments) and the beauty-conscious (for its alleged ability to smooth wrinkled skin and restore lustre to hair). How much good they do, though, remains unclear.

Collagen is a structural protein that provides shape and support to everything from skin and bones to muscles and tendons. One estimate is that it makes up 25-30% of all protein in the body. And since the body is constantly growing new skin and hair and remodelling its bones, it gets through quite a bit of the stuff every day.

Exactly how much it needs—and whether it can get it all from a healthy diet—is hazy. Like all proteins, collagen is built up from smaller amino acids, a set of chemical Lego bricks that can be assembled in an endless variety of ways. Nine of those amino acids are classified as “essential”, meaning humans cannot produce them internally and must get them directly from food. But glycine and proline—the two most abundant amino acids in collagen—are not among them. Both can be produced by the body from other chemicals, suggesting that supplements might not be necessary after all.

There are, appropriately enough, wrinkles. Collagen synthesis declines with age, for one thing. Sunbathing, cigarettes and too much booze also seem to slow its production. And some researchers have tried to argue, from biochemical first principles, that glycine may be “semi-essential”: although the body can produce some of the stuff, it may not be enough to properly meet demand. For all these reasons, taking supplements might be useful.

The empirical evidence is decidedly mixed, and of uneven quality. Still, one review paper in the International Journal of Dermatology, published in 2021, examined 19 other articles to conclude that taking collagen supplements did seem to decrease skin wrinkling. Another, published earlier this year in Orthopedic Reviews, looked at 14 studies on the effects of collagen on joints and found around half reported positive effects.

But the focus on collagen may be misguided. Collagen supplements are really just a glycine- and proline-rich subspecies of standard protein powder. One possibility is that the benefits from taking collagen are really just the benefits of taking protein in disguise. If so, a complete protein like whey (or a more protein-rich diet) may well be better than a lower-quality source like collagen.

There is evidence to support this. One notably rigorous—albeit short-term—study, published in 2023 by researchers in the Netherlands, measured the effects on connective tissue of having a group of athletes take either a placebo, collagen or whey. It found that, though neither collagen nor the placebo seemed to boost tissue growth during recovery from exercise, whey protein did.

For now, those keen on collagen can take comfort from the fact that no study has suggested the stuff is harmful. In the meantime, those looking for a useful hack might consider gelatine, a processed form of collagen used to make things like jelly, sweets and marshmallows. It can be bought at a fraction of the cost of the pricey supplements. ■

Culture | The glow of woe

Why “Wednesday” is wickedly successful

The Addams family has a secret—but it is not what you think

She’s caught millions of thesePhotograph: Jonathan Hession/Netflix

Aug 5th 2025|4 min read

---

WHEN YOU think of Netflix’s biggest English-language dramas, you probably imagine matchmaking, monsters or malignant young men. Seasons of “Bridgerton”, “Stranger Things” and “Adolescence” all rank in the platform’s top ten releases, having racked up hundreds of millions of views. But the streamer’s breakout hero is a gloomy girl who has long plaits, psychic visions and a knack for sarcasm.

“Wednesday”, about the eldest child of the Addams family, is a supernatural smash. Viewers spent 1.7bn hours—roughly 200,000 years—watching the show in the three months after its debut in November 2022. According to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, “Wednesday” made $360m in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its release and March of this year: that is $40m more than the first season of “Squid Game”, Netflix’s biggest title in any language, did in an equivalent period. “Wednesday” returned to screens for a second season on August 6th. What explains its otherworldly power?

Part of its appeal is its mix of the ordinary and the eerie. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is, in some ways, a typically sullen teenage girl. She bickers with her family, made up of a brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), an eccentric uncle, Fester (Fred Armisen), and her parents, Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, whose hairpiece looks like a flattened chinchilla covered in asphalt).

Wednesday finds most people annoyingly, boringly conformist, and prefers the company of Thing, an ambulatory severed hand. She loathes school—in this case, the Nevermore Academy, which specialises in educating outcasts. Like many of her real-life peers, she enjoys true crime—but, unlike them, she is able to help solve local murders on account of her premonitions.

Photograph: Jonathan Hession/Netflix

The show shares traits with “Stranger Things” in that both follow a group of winsome teenagers investigating strange happenings in a small town. (And both are the scrubbed-up children of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” without the originality or genuine existential dread.) As in “Harry Potter”, the school is replete with coloured uniforms and houses filled with unusual characters, from gorgons to werewolves.

But “Wednesday” looks different from those shows thanks to the involvement of Tim Burton, a film-maker famous for wry gothic fantasies such as “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands”. He has helped produce “Wednesday” and directed half of its episodes. (His longtime musical collaborator, Danny Elfman, has also written some of its unsettling score.) The script is snappy: combined with the quick, tortuous plotting, it provides laughs, jump scares and creepy moments. “Want to take a stab at being social?” Wednesday’s perky room-mate asks her in the first season. “I do like stabbing,” Wednesday retorts.

It has no doubt helped “Wednesday” that its characters have been mainstays of Halloween costumes for decades. The family, nameless to begin with, first appeared in a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker in 1938. In 1964 a tv executive brought them to the small screen. Charles Addams, their creator, lamented that the family was only “half as evil” as in his comics, yet the show made the Addamses twice as popular—and Addams himself a much wealthier man. Subsequent black-comedy films in the 1990s boosted their fame again.

Addams would be pleased that, over the years, the oddball family has become increasingly macabre, as well as zany and camp. In the first series Gomez staged train crashes with model trains. In the current one, Wednesday punishes the boys who bully Pugsley by releasing hungry piranhas into a swimming pool during water-polo practice.

Yet the Addamses are not popular because they are wicked or weird: in the current series, they are kinder, better people than the “normies” who hate them. They have endured across generations because, beneath the idiosyncrasies, they are a functional family. If you ignore the severed hand, the household is made up of two parents, two children, an uncle and a grunting servant. Wednesday’s family is both what every teenager fears—cringeworthy—and what they wish for: loving and accepting. Gomez and Morticia are besotted with each other and they dote on their children, who love and torture each other in equal measure, as siblings often do. “Wednesday” is heartening as well as spooky viewing, on any day of the week. ■

Obituary | Old Father Timer

Fr Patrick Ryan, the “Devil’s Disciple”, improved IRA bomb-making

The former Catholic priest died on June 15th, aged 94

Photograph: RollingNews.ie

Aug 7th 2025|5 min read

---

Tick, tick, tick. The sound as he stepped into the shop was overwhelming. There were simple clocks and fancy clocks, pocket clocks and—this was Switzerland, after all—cuckoo clocks. A cacophony of ticking. But Father Patrick Ryan wasn’t interested in cuckoo clocks. His eye had been caught by the small, round timers in the window. Locals used them to remind themselves when their parking meter was about to run out: set the timer going—tick, tick, tick—and when it went off, your time was up. He asked the shopkeeper for one. The shopkeeper laughed: what a cheap thing to choose. Father Ryan smiled. The world could laugh. In time, it would see that the joke was on it.

And, in time the world did see. But it didn’t laugh. Father Ryan bought about 900 of those timers. Then the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set them going: tick, tick, tick—and when they went off, your time was up. Time up for the 12 soldiers killed by a timed bomb in Warrenpoint in 1979 (that one was set for 5.12pm). Time up for the two people killed by bombs in Canary Wharf in 1996 (7.01pm). Time up for the five killed in 1984 in the Grand Brighton Hotel (2.54am). Almost time up for Margaret Thatcher, who staggered out, cement dust still in her mouth. They had had to set that one for 24 days, 6 hours and 36 minutes. They were ingenious things, really: the little timers that made all the difference.

They certainly made all the difference to him. He had been born in Tipperary and grown up in a world that was clockwork with Catholicism. Fish on Fridays, fasting on Saturdays, mass on Sundays, the rosary every night: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell. His mother brought him up to love Jesus and hate “the enemy”—the English. Who would in time hate him back: he became known as the “mad priest”, the “Terror Priest”, the “devil in a dog collar”, the “Devil’s Disciple” and, more prosaically, as one of Britain’s most wanted men.

He’d not started out to be a devil—though he’d never been too saintly, either. He signed on to be a priest at 14, worked hard at his studies and played hard, too, at hurling. He showed his roguery in that. They nicknamed him “Sorry” because he would hit another player, say “Sorry”, then hit him again straight after and say “Sorry” again. But he really wasn’t ever sorry. They could all see that. Then he’d been shipped out to be a priest in Tanganyika, in Africa, where he’d helped locals with engineering projects. It was when he was sent back home that, as Jennifer O’Leary records in her book “The Padre”, the iRA approached him: would he, perchance, like to work for them? Perchance he would.

At first he helped by ferrying money across Europe: Paris, Rome (he liked the gelato), Geneva. Swiss banks, he learned, had to guard your secrets like a priest. That pleased him. But it was clear to him that the IRA needed not just more money but better engineering. The number of bombs was increasing—they’d planted 153 by the end of 1970, then 1,300 in 1972—but not their accuracy. They went off all the time: in cars, in kitchens, in people’s hands. They called them the “own goals”. There was never much left of someone after an own goal: just bits and pieces under a car. It was in Geneva that he saw the timers. He instantly realised their worth: Swiss timepieces for an enemy that ran like clockwork.

Take the Household Cavalry’s changing of the guard. At 10.28am they would start to leave their Hyde Park barracks. Out by 10.30am, on past Buckingham Palace, at Horse Guards Parade by 11am. So regular you could set your watch to them. So regular you could set your timer to them. For that one he used a different detonator but the result was the same. When the bomb exploded four men were killed and seven horses. That bomb, Father Ryan later said, was his work. Absolutely one hundred per cent. Oh yes.

Father Ryan’s timing wasn’t always perfect. On August 27th, 1979, he happened to be in County Sligo. It was a lovely sunny day—so lovely that Lord Mountbatten, King Charles’s great-uncle, had gone out on his boat with his family and a local boat boy. The IRA bomb was so loud that the boat boy’s father heard it from his house. He drove to the shore, arriving in time to see his son’s body pulled from the water. “Look what you’ve done to him,” he kept saying. “Look what you’ve done.” There was more than one way to score an own goal. Father Ryan left Sligo briskly.

In a war you didn’t just need timing, you needed luck. The British knew that, the IRA knew it. Few bombs showed it better than the Brighton bomb of 1984. That bomb had been tricky: the Grand hotel had been crawling with police all week; it had been known for years that the IRA wanted to assassinate Thatcher. So the IRA planted their bomb, with its little Swiss timer, early: 24 days early. The timer worked but the assassination failed: they had right time but the wrong suite. The IRA’s statement reflected on the role of fortune. Remember, it read, “we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

And then it was over. There was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and peace in Northern Ireland and handshakes with the queen and the Troubles were suddenly less troubling. Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Féin (formerly the political wing of the IRA) took to Twitter and started issuing whimsical, avuncular tweets. He tweeted about cupcakes; about his dog; about how bothersome it was switching off all the fairy-lights in one’s home at Christmas. Not everyone was charmed. “Surely,” someone tweeted back, “you know someone who can fit a timer?”

And the man who had provided the IRA with its timers? He was less avuncular. A few years before he died, he was interviewed about his past. He was, by then, no longer a priest (the Catholic church had booted him out) but he still wore Bible-black; still had that priestly, authoritative air. Did he, the interviewer asked, have any regrets? Oh yes, he said. “I have big regrets.” Ever a one for timing, he paused. “I regret that I wasn’t even more effective.” ■