The food-show craze

[Van!]

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21656240-epicurean-entertainment-luring-korean-men-kitchen-food-show-craze

The Economist

Cooking in South Korea

The food-show craze

Epicurean entertainment is luring Korean men into the kitchen

Jun 27th 2015 | SEOUL | From the print edition

[1] SOUTH KOREAN men do less housework than those in any other advanced country. But Son Cheol-ju, a 40-year-old businessman, says he has overcome his “fear of the kitchen” thanks to a television show called “Mr Paek’s Home Cooking”, which started airing in May. It is full of nifty tips. When preparing a bubbling pot of kimchi jjigae, (a delicious, fiery stew of fermented cabbage), Mr Son now uses only water that has been used to wash rice, which makes it taste even better.

[2] “Mr Paek’s Home Cooking” is the latest of a host of new food shows in South Korea. “What Shall We Eat Today?” follows two male novices in the kitchen who do away with recipes and measurements. In “Please Take Care of My Refrigerator”, chefs use basic ingredients from the fridges of Korean celebrities to rustle up dishes in 15 minutes. “Three Meals A Day” is set in mountains and remote fishing villages; guests must forage and harvest to prepare dinners from scratch. Soaps, variety shows and even news bulletins are offering up food scenes. “My Chef from the Star” (taking its name from a hit drama of 2013) is about the stars of these cookbang, or cooking broadcasts.

[3] Many South Koreans also enjoy mokbang, online “eating broadcasts” that live-stream ordinary people gorging on heaps of takeout food. Viewers, sometimes in the thousands, interact with their favourite eaters in real-time, messaging them and sending online donations. The most entertaining noodle-slurpers can earn up to $1,000 in a three-hour stint. Some are obese teenagers; others are petite women. Dieting viewers say the appeal is vicarious gluttony; for the lonely, it is company. Though ever more South Koreans live alone, eating alone remains taboo (shikgu, Korean for family, means “mouths to feed”).

[4] All this culinary entertainment may be having an effect. Lotte Mart, a department store, says that sales of salt, sauces and spices have shot up over the past 12 months; it has also sold 72% more woks and 63% more kitchen utensils. Men’s cooking classes have multiplied.

[5] But Hwang Kyo-ik, who hosts a talk show called the “Wednesday Gourmet Club”, thinks Korean food fever is a symptom of widespread unhappiness amid the country’s economic doldrums. Most of the shows are less about cookery than about enjoyment, he observes. Many South Koreans have neither the time nor the means to dine elegantly. Mokbang and cookbang offer them a feast for their eyes, at least.

From the print edition: Asia

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21656235-why-boom-big-outdoor-music-festivals-may-not-be-sustainable-smells-middle-aged-spirit

The Economist

The live music industry

Smells like middle-aged spirit

Why the boom in big outdoor music festivals may not be sustainable

Jun 27th 2015 | From the print edition

[1] TO JUDGE by the crowds making their way to Glastonbury Festival on June 24th, it is a good time to be in the music industry. This week nearly 200,000 revellers set up camp across several fields in Somerset, where the festival has been held nearly every year since it first started as a small, hippyish event in 1970. Now hundreds of live bands and DJs will perform on 90 stages over five days. Each punter pays £225 ($353) for the experience, which, thanks to the damp British weather, tends to be a muddy one.

[2] Glastonbury is perhaps the most striking example in Britain of how big music festivals are booming. But as the demand for festivals becomes ever greater, a potential supply-side problem has started to become apparent. It hints at how the music industry has changed rapidly over the past ten years, and how it may need to adapt.

[3] Over the past decade sales of recorded music fell sharply. According to the BPI, an industry body, income from recorded music fell from £1.2 billion in 2004 to just under £700m in 2014. The fall has slowed in recent years, partly because of the increase in online streaming, which accounted for £115m in 2014. But other revenue streams have become far more important—particularly the live music industry. In 2011 it was worth £1.6 billion, according to PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers.

[4] A large chunk of this booming live market is in summer festivals. Whereas around 80 big festivals took place in 2004, there are now over 250 scattered across the country. The season stretches for nearly six months. As new festivals have sprung up, established ones have got far larger. Reading Festival used to have a capacity of around 40,000 people in the mid-1980s, recalls Steve Parker of Live UK, an industry magazine; and it would only pull a crowd of 20,000 or 30,000, he says. Now over 80,000 people go there each year. And despite ticket prices rising faster than inflation, many festivals sell out. All the tickets for Glastonbury were snapped up in 26 minutes in October last year.

[5] Big artists and promoters both benefit from this boom, says Tim Chambers, a music consultant. Artists bag only 10% of the net profit from recorded music, but can command up to 90% of gross ticket receipts. And promoters can make money from large, captive audiences by charging eye-watering prices for food, merchandise and parking.

[6] However, the popularity of festivals poses a problem. As they have grown in Britain so too have they blossomed in America, Asia and Europe. But the pool of artists who appeal to large, diverse crowds and have enough music to play for an hour or more has not increased at the same rate. This means that there are not enough big headliners to go around. Analysis by Will Page, the director of economics at Spotify, a streaming service, shows that the average age of headline acts at nine festivals in Britain has gradually risen (see chart). In the 1990s, bands in their mid-twenties, such as Radiohead, headlined at Glastonbury, points out Mr Page. Although exceptions exist—this year, the 28-year-old Florence Welch was drafted in at the last minute to headline the Friday slot—it appears to be getting rarer, he says.

[7] Part of the reason for this may be that punters themselves are ageing: according to Festival Insights, an industry publication, in 2014 the average age of a festival-goer was 33. Promoters may be reacting to this by putting on older acts. But it also reflects a supply-side constraint in the market, says Chris Carey, a music consultant. Fewer small clubs and pubs exist for new young bands to start out, he says, and older bands are still keen to perform live in order to boost their coffers. This means that fledgling artists find it both harder to start a career and to muscle in to a headline slot once they have gained momentum.

[8] Solving this problem will not be easy. Big record labels are less willing than in the past to take risks or nurture new talent. It is a “more cut-throat industry”, says Rob da Bank, the DJ behind Bestival, another big festival. If a second album is unsuccessful, artists are often dropped. And online music services have changed the way people listen to music: rather than consuming a whole album, people can pick and choose. New music “moves so much faster than ten years ago”, says Rob Challice, an agent and festival director. Bands become popular quickly but disappear just as swiftly.

[9] If headliners cannot be found, then festivals will have to adapt. Many have already become nicer to attend, with showers, better food, yurts and the like. Some may have to specialise in a particular genre of music, or scale down to their original size. Rather than chase one big artist or band with a hefty fee, organisers may have to look for several middling ones to headline. Perhaps this is no bad thing. As live music booms, it is becoming increasingly competitive.

From the print edition: Britain

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21656176-governments-believe-their-diasporas-can-solve-all-sorts-problems-they-are-picky

The Economist

Diasporas

Gone but not forgotten

Governments believe their diasporas can solve all sorts of problems. But they are a picky, unbiddable bunch

Jun 27th 2015 | From the print edition

[1] IF YOUR surname is McNamara and you live outside Ireland, expect a letter. Ireland Reaching Out, a non-profit organisation financed largely by the Irish government, has pioneered what it calls “reverse genealogy”. Rather than waiting for people to trace their Irish ancestry, it constructs family trees from root to branch, tracking down the descendants of those who left for America, Australia and other countries. Volunteers then invite them to visit the homeland. It is a mighty task: Mike Feerick, the outfit’s founder, wants to build a database of the Irish diaspora containing 30m or 40m names.

[2] Last year Ireland appointed its first minister for the Irish diaspora; this spring it unveiled a diaspora strategy. As well as Ireland Reaching Out, the government supports hundreds of groups that serve needy Irish emigrants or court successful ones. One of them, Connect Ireland, uses the diaspora as spies for inward investment: it pays for tip-offs that lead to foreign companies creating jobs in the country.

[3] In the early 1980s barely a dozen countries had a ministry, a government department or some other official institution dedicated to their diasporas. And a few countries, including America, still ignore those who have left—except perhaps to send them tax demands. But these are a shrinking minority (see chart). Kingsley Aikins, an Irishman who advises governments on how to deal with their far-flung folk, has travelled in the past few weeks to Lebanon, Malawi and Wales.

[4] Ministers and bureaucrats are multiplying partly because diasporas are too. The World Bank reckons that about 250m people live outside the country of their birth; the number of foreign migrants living in OECD countries rose by 38% in the 2000s. And diasporas are not just composed of emigrants. The Irish government thinks that everybody of Irish descent—perhaps 60m or 70m people—is part of the Irish diaspora. Israel claims all Jews.

[5] Countries are also paying more attention these days because they believe their diasporas can make them rich. When the World Bank began to publish estimates of remittance flows in 2003, “you could see the dollar signs flashing in finance ministers’ eyes,” says Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank. And that was only the beginning of an infatuation. Politicians and officials have since concluded that diasporas can help cure an extraordinarily wide range of national ills, from poor global reputations to weak infrastructure to a shortage of scientific talent. But can they?

[6] A few months after his victory in India’s elections last year, Narendra Modi addressed a whooping crowd of some 20,000 Indian-Americans in Madison Square Garden in New York. Thanks to them, the new prime minister said, India was no longer seen as a land of snake charmers but as a technology powerhouse. This was flattery, but with serious intent. India sees its diaspora, which the government thinks is about 25m strong, as a means of projecting soft power and burnishing the country’s image. “No country has had such a large brain drain and been so proud of it,” says Devesh Kapur of the University of Pennsylvania.

[7] Inspired partly by the example of Israel, many countries have come to believe that their diasporas can advance their geopolitical interests. The Turkish government counts on its diaspora in Europe, especially Germany, to push for closer relations with the EU; Mexico knows that Mexican-Americans will campaign against attempts to crack down on illegal immigrants. In exchange for their help, and to bind them to the politics of their homeland, a growing number of countries offer diasporas long-term visas (as India has done), dual citizenship or some voting rights. In 2010 France’s parliament created 11 new constituencies for the French abroad.

[8] Poor and middle-income countries also see their diasporas as a source of cash. Emigrants send remittances, often in vast quantities—India receives $70 billion a year, and remittances to Tajikistan are worth half of the country’s GDP. Because they are a source of foreign exchange, rating agencies can take remittances into account when assessing a country’s creditworthiness. Future flows of money can be ecuritized, as Brazil and Jamaica, among others, have done. Governments have also hawked infrastructure bonds to their diasporas, who might buy them for patriotic reasons, and also might not object to repayment in local currency. Israel, which has been doing this since 1951, is once again the country to copy.

Prodigious sons

[9] These days, however, diasporas are increasingly seen as talent pools that can be pumped. When its economy crashed in 2009, Ireland summoned some of its most successful overseas progeny to an economic forum, which continues to meet every two years. Mexico used to think of its diaspora in America mostly as working-class remittance senders. It now encourages its young citizens to study in American universities—and then bring their skills home. Ghana, which has a particularly talented diaspora (see article), has set up a support unit to schmooze them.

[10] No country is hungrier than China. Emulating Taiwan, which built a technology industry with the help of Taiwanese Stanford graduates, it is trying to woo its most talented foreign-educated citizens to come back; those who do are called “sea turtles”. Provincial cities offer tax breaks to returning entrepreneurs and create industrial parks for them. Under the “thousand talents” scheme (which is even more ambitious than it sounds) academics who have built careers abroad are offered far more money than is usually paid to Chinese professors. The wooing is broad and relentless: one Chinese-British academic contacted for this article had been approached that very morning.

[11] She is not interested, though—and in that she is typical. Patrick Gaulé, a researcher in Prague, has tracked the careers of foreign-born scientists in America. He estimates that less than 9% will return during their working lives. Scientists from well-off countries are most likely to go back: the Taiwanese are about five times more likely to return than are the mainland Chinese, for example. Surveys of PhD students in America find that 82% of Chinese and 84% of Indians plan to stay.

[12] Apart from all the obvious things that bind people to their adopted homes—friends, children in school, husbands and wives reluctant to leave—it is often hard to find jobs in the countries where they were born. Returnees may have fewer contacts than those who never left. And Kaifu Lee, who was born in Taiwan, worked in America and now invests in technology firms in China, says that although foreign-educated computer scientists are technically excellent, they can suffer from inflated expectations—the result, in part, of comparing themselves to the earlier returnees who built China’s great technology firms. And never mind the tax breaks and the industrial parks, he says: almost everybody who returns wants to be in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

[13] Nor can diasporas cure many financial ills. Whereas India and a few other countries have done well out of diaspora bonds, others (such as Ethiopia) have struggled to find buyers: expats turn out to be less patriotic and more hard-headed than is often supposed. Remittances are reliable—more so, in a recession, than foreign direct investment. But even these suffer from exchange-rate fluctuations: flows from Russia to Central Asia have plunged in dollar terms as the rouble has collapsed.

[14] Trying to use diasporans to lobby for national interests is even harder. People leave countries for a reason, and that reason is often disdain. Mexicans “did not leave Mexico por gusto [for pleasure]”, says Carlos González Gutiérrez, the Mexican consul in Austin, Texas. Older migrants in particular frequently distrust the government. And expat politics is often a hothouse, in which intransigent views flourish and ancient battles are endlessly refought, whether or not they benefit the homeland.

[15] Even when expats are on the side of the government, they are tough to wrangle. The American branch of Overseas Friends of BJP dispatched volunteers to India and manned phone banks during last year’s Indian elections. No sooner had its man, Mr Modi, been elected prime minister than the outfit sent him a list of demands. Overseas Indians would like the vote, please. They would also like more flights between America and India, kinder treatment at consulates, fewer restrictions on buying land and better arrangements for shipping dead bodies back to India.

A thankless, noble task

[16] So the wooing is hard. Yet the effort is worthwhile, even if a country’s diaspora resists its entreaties. Indeed, it is worthwhile precisely because diasporas are so churlish and hard to court. The difficult things that expats tend to demand of their governments—representation, a good business climate, decent investment returns—are the sort of things that governments ought to be trying to provide anyway.

[17] India reformed its antiquated venture-capital regulations at the instigation of Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley. China is now cutting some of the red tape that is required to start a business partly because of pressure from returnees, says Wang Huiyao of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think-tank in Beijing. And China is no longer just trying to bring back its diaspora: it also wants Western talent.

[18] “The diaspora is a powerful engine of change, and for good,” says Mr González Gutiérrez, in Texas. “They are the first people to advocate for openness, for free markets, for better-quality democracy.” Most countries could do with more of that.

From the print edition: International