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A Biased Market

2008-10-31T04:20:00.000-07:00

Economics focus

A biased market
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Skewed news reporting is taken as a sign of a dysfunctional media. In fact, it may be a sign of healthy competition

Illustration by Jac DepczykBARACK OBAMA recently told a writer for the New York Times Magazine that he was convinced he might be two or three percentage points better off in the polls for the American presidential election if Fox News, a right-leaning television station, did not exist. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice-president, has made hay railing against the bias of the “liberal media”. Allegations of partial news reporting are common in American politics. But few stop to ask what leads to differences in the way the news is reported.

Bias can be thought of as a supply-side phenomenon that arises from ideology. Owners’ or employees’ political views will determine how a newspaper or channel slants its coverage of a piece of news. But this does not square with the assumption that readers and viewers value accuracy. If so, then competition should hurt media outlets that systematically distort the news (in any direction). The brouhaha about bias in America, as free a media market as any, suggests something else is going on.

The key to understanding why bias flourishes in a competitive market may lie in thinking more clearly about what readers actually want. Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, two Harvard economists, argued in an influential paper* that it may be naive to think that people care about accuracy alone. Instead, they modelled the consequences of assuming that newspaper readers also like to have their beliefs confirmed by what they read. As long as readers have different beliefs, the Mullainathan-Shleifer model suggests that competition, far from driving biased reporting out of the market, would encourage newspapers to cater to the biases of different segments of the reading public. A more recent paper** by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, two economists at the University of Chicago’s business school, set out to test this proposition.

To do so, they first needed a way to measure the political slant of American news coverage. Their solution was rather imaginative. The researchers ran computer programs that analysed debates in Congress and identified phrases that were disproportionately used by Republicans or Democrats. The list of frequent Democratic phrases, for example, included “estate tax”. While talking about the same issue, Republicans tended to use the phrase “death tax”. (This is not just coincidence. Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro quote an anonymous Republican staffer as saying that the party machine trained members to say “death tax”, because “‘estate tax’ sounds like it hits only the wealthy but ‘death tax’ sounds like it hits everyone”.) Having identified partisan phrases, the academics then analysed the news coverage of more than 400 American newspapers to see how often they cropped up in reporting. This gave them a precise measure of “slant”, showing the extent to which the news coverage in these papers tended to use politically charged phrases.

Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro then needed to assess the political beliefs of different newspapers’ readerships, which they did using data on the share of votes in each newspaper’s market that went to President Bush in the 2004 presidential elections, and information on how likely people in different parts of that market were to contribute to entities allied to either Democrats or Republicans. The researchers were now able to look at the relationships between circulation, slant, and people’s political views.

First, they measured whether a newspaper’s circulation responded to the match between its slant and its readers’ views. Not surprisingly, they found that more “Republican” newspapers had relatively higher circulations in more “Republican” zip codes. But their calculations of the degree to which circulation responded to political beliefs also allowed them to do something more interesting: to calculate what degree of slant would be most profitable for each newspaper in their sample to adopt, given the political make-up of the market it covered. They compared this profit-maximising slant to their measure of the actual slant of each newspaper’s coverage.

They found a striking congruence between the two. Newspapers tended, on average, to locate themselves neither to the right nor to the left of the level of slant that Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro reckon would maximise their profits. And for good commercial reasons: their model showed that even a minor deviation from this “ideal” level of slant would hurt profits through a sizeable loss of circulation.

Have I got skews for you
Showing that newspapers have a political slant that is economically rational does not necessarily answer the question of whether ownership or demand determines bias. Here, the academics are helped by the fact that large media companies may own several newspapers, often in markets that are politically very different. This allowed them to test whether the slants of newspapers with the same owner were more strongly correlated than those of two newspapers picked at random. They found that this was not so: owners exerted a negligible influence on slant. Readers’ political views explained about a fifth of measured slant, while ownership explained virtually none.

None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented. After all, just as Mrs Palin does not spend her time condemning Fox News, Mr Obama is unlikely to have too many complaints about the New York Times.

* “The Market for News”, American Economic Review (September 2005).
** “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers” (May 2007) http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/matthew.gentzkow/biasmeas081507.pdf

The frayed knot

2007-07-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

Marriage in America

May 24th 2007 | MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
From The Economist print edition

SKC

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality

THE students at West Virginia University don't want you to think they take life too seriously. It is the third-best “party school” in America, according to the Princeton Review's annual ranking of such things, and comes a creditable fifth in the “lots of beer” category. Booze sometimes causes students' clothes to fall off. Those who wake up garmentless after a hook-up endure the “walk of shame”, trudging back to their own dormitories in an obviously borrowed football shirt, stirring up gossip with every step.

And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don't see how it's a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.

A few blocks away, in a soup kitchen attached to a church, another 18-year-old balances a baby on her knee. Laura has a less planned approach to parenthood. “It just happened,” she says. The father and she were “never really together”, merely “friends with benefits, I guess”. He is now gone. “I didn't want to put up with his stuff,” she says. “Drugs and stuff,” she adds, by way of explanation.

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

Does this matter? Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank, says it does. In her book “Marriage and Caste in America”, she argues that the “marriage gap” is the chief source of the country's notorious and widening inequality. Middle-class kids growing up with two biological parents are “socialised for success”. They do better in school, get better jobs and go on to create intact families of their own. Children of single parents or broken families do worse in school, get worse jobs and go on to have children out of wedlock. This makes it more likely that those born near the top or the bottom will stay where they started. America, argues Ms Hymowitz, is turning into “a nation of separate and unequal families”.

A large majority—92%—of children whose families make more than $75,000 a year live with two parents (including step-parents). At the bottom of the income scale—families earning less than $15,000—only 20% of children live with two parents. One might imagine that this gap arises simply because two breadwinners earn more than one. A single mother would have to be unusually talented and diligent to make as much as $75,000 while also raising children on her own. And it is impossible in America for two full-time, year-round workers to earn less than $15,000 between them, unless they are (illegally) paid less than the minimum wage.

But there is more to it than this. Marriage itself is “a wealth-generating institution”, according to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, who run the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. Those who marry “till death do us part” end up, on average, four times richer than those who never marry. This is partly because marriage provides economies of scale—two can live more cheaply than one—and because the kind of people who make more money—those who work hard, plan for the future and have good interpersonal skills—are more likely to marry and stay married. But it is also because marriage affects the way people behave.

American men, once married, tend to take their responsibilities seriously. Avner Ahituv of the University of Haifa and Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute found that “entering marriage raises hours worked quickly and substantially.” Married men drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder, earning between 10% and 40% more than single men with similar schooling and job histories. And marriage encourages both spouses to save and invest more for the future. Each partner provides the other with a form of insurance against falling sick or losing a job.

Marriage also encourages the division of labour. Ms Dafoe Whitehead and Mr Popenoe put it like this: “Working as a couple, individuals can develop those skills in which they excel, leaving others to their partner.” Mum handles the tax returns while Dad fixes the car. Or vice versa. As Adam Smith observed two centuries ago, when you specialise, you get better at what you do, and you produce more.

Perhaps the most convincing work showing that marriage is more than just a piece of paper was done by Mr Lerman of the Urban Institute. In “Married and Unmarried Parenthood and Economic Wellbeing”, he addressed the “selection effect”—the question of whether married-couple families do better because of the kind of people who marry, or because of something about marriage itself.

Using data from a big annual survey, he looked at all the women who had become pregnant outside marriage. He estimated the likelihood that they would marry, using dozens of variables known to predict this, such as race, income and family background. He then found out whether they did in fact marry, and what followed.

His results were striking. Mothers who married ended up much better off than mothers with the same disadvantages who did not. So did their children. Among those in the bottom quartile of “propensity to marry”, those who married before the baby was six months old were only half as likely to be raising their children in poverty five years later as those who did not (33% to 60%).

Changes in family structure thus have a large impact on the economy. One of the most-cited measures of prosperity, household income, is misleading over time because household sizes have changed. In 1947, the average household contained 3.6 people. By 2006, that number had dwindled to 2.6. This partly reflects two happy facts: more young singles can afford to flee the nest and their parents are living longer after they go. But it also reflects the dismal trend towards family break-up. A study by Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill concluded that if the black family had not collapsed between 1960 and 1998, the black child-poverty rate would have been 28.4% rather than 45.6%. And if white families had stayed like they were in 1960, the white child poverty rate would have been 11.4% rather than 15.4%.

Children of the sexual revolution
Since the 1960s, the easy availability of reliable contraception has helped to spur a revolution in sexual mores. As opportunities for women opened up in the workplace, giving them an incentive to delay child-bearing, a little pill let them do just that without sacrificing sex. At the same time, better job opportunities for women changed the balance of power within marriage. Wives became less economically dependent on their husbands, so they found it easier to walk out of unhappy or abusive relationships.

As the sexual revolution gathered steam, the idea that a nuclear family was the only acceptable environment in which to raise a child crumbled. The social stigma around single motherhood, which was intense before the 1960s, has faded. But attitudes still vary by class.

College-educated women typically see single motherhood as a distant second-best to marriage. If they have babies out of wedlock, it is usually because they have not yet got round to marrying the man they are living with. Or because, finding themselves single and nearly 40, they decide they cannot wait for Mr Right and so seek a sperm donor. By contrast, many of America's least-educated women live in neighbourhoods where single motherhood is the norm. And when they have babies outside marriage, they are typically younger than their middle-class counterparts, in less stable relationships and less prepared for what will follow.

Consider the home life of Lisa Ballard, a 26-year-old single mother in Morgantown. She strains every nerve to give her children the best upbringing she can, while also looking for a job. Her four-year-old son Alex loves the Dr Seuss book “Green Eggs and Ham”, so she reads it to him, and once put green food colouring in his breakfast eggs, which delighted him. But the sheer complexity of her domestic arrangements makes life “very challenging”, she says.

She has four children by three different men. Two were planned, two were not. Two live with her; she has shared custody of one and no custody of another. One of the fathers was “a butthole” who hit her, she says, and is no longer around. The other two are “good fathers”, in that they have steady jobs, pay maintenance, make their children laugh and do not spank them. But none of them still lives with her.

Miss Ballard now thinks that having children before getting married was “not a good idea”. She says she would like to get married some day, though she finds the idea of long-term commitment scary. “You've got to definitely make sure it's the person you want to grow old with. You know, sitting on rocking chairs giggling at the comics. I want to find the right one. I ask God: ‘What does he look like? Can you give me a little hint?’”

If she does find and wed the man of her dreams, Miss Ballard will encounter a problem. She has never seen her own father. Having never observed a stable marriage close-up, she will have to guess how to make one work. By contrast, Ashley, the criminology student at the nearby university, has never seen a divorce in her family. This makes it much more likely that, when the time is right, she will get married and stay that way. And that, in turn, makes it more likely that her children will follow her to college.

Most children in single-parent homes “grow up without serious problems”, writes Mary Parke of the Centre for Law and Social Policy, a think-tank in Washington, DC. But they are more than five times as likely to be poor as those who live with two biological parents (26% against 5%). Children who do not live with both biological parents are also roughly twice as likely to drop out of high school and to have behavioural or psychological problems. Even after controlling for race, family background and IQ, children of single mothers do worse in school than children of married parents, says Ms Hymowitz.

Children whose father was never around face the toughest problems. For those whose parents split up, the picture is more nuanced. If parents detest each other and quarrel bitterly, their kids may actually benefit from a divorce. Paul Amato of Penn State University has found that 40% of American divorces leave the children better (or at least, no worse) off than the turbulent marriages that preceded them. In other cases, however, what is good for the parents may well harm the children. And two parents are likely to be better at child-rearing because they can devote more time and energy to it than one can.

Research also suggests that middle- and working-class parents approach child-rearing in different ways. Professional parents shuttle their kids from choir practice to baseball camp and check that they are doing their homework. They also talk to them more. One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620.

Co-habiting couples have the same number of hands as married couples, so they ought to make equally good parents. Many do, but on average the children of co-habiting couples do worse by nearly every measure. One reason is that such relationships are less stable than marriages. In America, they last about two years on average. About half end in marriage. But those who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce.

Many people will find this surprising. A survey of teenagers by the University of Michigan found that 64% of boys and 57% of girls agreed that “it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out whether they really get along.” Research suggests otherwise. Two-thirds of American children born to co-habiting parents who later marry will see their parents split up by the time they are ten. Those born within wedlock face only half that risk.

The likeliest explanation is inertia, says Scott Stanley of the Centre for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado. Couples start living together because it is more fun (and cheaper) than living apart. One partner may see this as a prelude to marriage. The other—usually the man—may see it as something more temporary. Since no explicit commitment is made, it is easier to drift into living together than it is to drift into a marriage. But once a couple is living together, it is harder to split up than if they were merely dating. So “many of these men end up married to women they would not have married if they hadn't been living together,” says Mr Stanley, co-author of a paper called “Sliding versus deciding”.

A little help from the government
Most American politicians say they support marriage, but few do much about it, except perhaps to sound off about the illusory threat to it from gays. The public are divided. Few want to go back to the attitudes or divorce laws of the 1950s. But many at both ends of the political spectrum lament the fragility of American families and would change, at least, the way the tax code penalises many couples who marry. And some politicians want the state to draw attention to benefits of marriage, as it does to the perils of smoking. George Bush is one.

Since last year, his administration has been handing out grants to promote healthy marriages. This is a less preachy enterprise than you might expect. Sidonie Squier, the bureaucrat in charge, does not argue that divorce is wrong: “If you're being abused, you should get out.” Nor does she think the government should take a view on whether people should have pre-marital sex.

Her budget for boosting marriage is tiny: $100m a year, or about what the Defence Department spends every two hours. Some of it funds research into what makes a relationship work well and whether outsiders can help. Most of the rest goes to groups that try to help couples get along better, some of which are religiously-inspired. The first 124 grants were disbursed only last September, so it is too early to say whether any of this will work. But certain approaches look hopeful.

One is “marriage education”. This is not the same as marriage therapy or counselling. Rather than waiting till a couple is in trouble and then having them sit down with a specialist to catalogue each other's faults, the administration favours offering relationship tips to large classes.

The army already does this. About 35,000 soldiers this year will get a 12-hour course on how to communicate better with their partners, and how to resolve disputes without throwing plates. It costs about $300 per family. Given that it costs $50,000 to recruit and train a rifleman, and that marital problems are a big reason why soldiers quit, you don't have to save many marriages for this to be cost-effective, says Peter Frederich, the chaplain in charge.

Several studies have shown that such courses do indeed help couples communicate better and quarrel less bitterly. As to whether they prevent divorce, a meta-analysis by Jason Carroll and William Doherty concluded that the jury was still out. The National Institutes of Health is paying for a five-year study of Mr Frederich's soldiers to shed further light on the issue.

Americans expect a lot from marriage. Whereas most Italians say the main purpose of marriage is to have children, 70% of Americans think it is something else. They want their spouse to make them happy. Some go further and assume that if they are not happy, it must be because they picked the wrong person. Sometimes that is true, sometimes not. There is no such thing as a perfectly compatible couple, argues Diane Sollee, director of smartmarriages.com, a pro-marriage group. Every couple has disputes, she says. What matters most is how they resolve them.

At the end of the day, says Ms Squier, the government's influence over the culture of marriage will be marginal. Messages from movies, peers and parents matter far more. But she does not see why, for example, the government's only contact with an unmarried father should be to demand that he pay child support. By not even mentioning marriage, the state is implying that no one expects him to stick around. Is that a helpful message?

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

RNA - Really New Advances

2007-06-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance

IT IS beginning to dawn on biologists that they may have got it wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough to be embarrassing. For half a century their subject had been built around the relation between two sorts of chemical. Proteins, in the form of enzymes, hormones and so on, made things happen. DNA, in the form of genes, contained the instructions for making proteins. Other molecules were involved, of course. Sugars and fats were abundant (too abundant, in some people). And various vitamins and minerals made an appearance, as well. Oh, and there was also a curious chemical called RNA, which looked a bit like DNA but wasn't. It obediently carried genetic information from DNA in the nucleus to the places in the cell where proteins are made, rounded up the amino-acid units out of which those proteins are constructed, and was found in the protein factories themselves.

All that was worked out decades ago. Since then, RNA has been more or less neglected as a humble carrier of messages and fetcher of building materials. This account of the cell was so satisfying to biologists that few bothered to look beyond it. But they are looking now. For, suddenly, cells seem to be full of RNA doing who-knows-what.

And the diversity is staggering. There are scnRNAs, snRNAs and snoRNAs. There are rasiRNAs, tasiRNAs and natsiRNAs. The piRNAs, which were discovered last summer, are abundant in developing sex cells. No male mammal, nor male fish, nor fly of either sex, would be fertile without them. Another RNA, called XIST, has the power to turn off an entire chromosome. It does so in females because they, unlike males, have two X chromosomes and would otherwise get an unhealthy double dose of many proteins. There is even a “pregnancy-induced non-coding RNA”, cutely termed PINC. New RNAs are rushing forth from laboratories so rapidly that a group called the RNA Ontology Consortium has been promised half a million dollars to prune and tend the growing thicket of RNA-tailed acronyms.

In the light of this abundance, perceptions about what a gene is need to change. Genes were once thought of almost exclusively as repositories of information about how to build proteins. Now, they need to be seen for what they really are: RNA factories. Genes for proteins may even be in the minority. In a human, the number of different microRNAs, one of the commonest of the newly discovered sorts of RNA, may be as high as 37,000 according to Isidore Rigoutsos, IBM's genome-miner in chief. That compares with the 21,000 or so protein-encoding genes that people have.

Philosophers of science love this sort of thing. They refer to it as a paradigm shift. Living through such a shift is confusing for the scientists involved, and this one is no exception. But when it is over, it is likely to have changed people's views about how cells regulate themselves, how life becomes more complex, how certain mysterious diseases develop and even how the process of evolution operates. As a bonus, it also opens up avenues to develop new drugs.

Increase and multiply
Not everyone agrees with Dr Rigoutsos about how many microRNAs there are. But the results of a project called the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), published in this week's Nature, suggest he is on the right track. The project looked in detail at 1% of the human genome. When ENCODE started, four years ago, the conventional wisdom was that only a few percent of this 1%, corresponding mainly to the protein-coding genes, would actually be transcribed into RNA. In fact, most of it is. What this means is unclear—just how unclear being shown by the fact that although the consortium was willing to identify only eight places where this transcription definitely results in an RNA molecule with a job other than passively carrying the code for a protein, they found another 268 where there was likely to be one, and several thousand more where the data hinted there might be one. That compares with 487 protein-coding genes in the same sequence.

Other evidence suggests that microRNAs regulate the activity of at least a third of human protein-encoding genes. This means there are very few cellular processes that do not happen under their watch. Around 20 microRNAs, for instance, are made only in human embryonic stem cells. These molecules could turn out to be the key to understanding how such cells remain in a state from which they can become any other type of cell—the very reason embryonic stem cells hold such great medical promise.

The existence of microRNAs may also help to explain why some creatures are more complex than others. Until their discovery, this was something of a paradox. Knowing that DNA stores data that then get translated into living organisms, and that the complexities of development must require lots of information, biologists naturally expected that the more intricately formed an organism is, the more genes it would have in its cells. They therefore struggled when they found that C. elegans, a tiny worm that lacks a proper brain but is nevertheless widely studied by geneticists, has about 20,000 genes—only a little bit short of the number in a human. Indeed, this seems to be a general number for animals. Another geneticists' favourite, the fruit fly Drosophila, has a similar number. But, of course, the genes in question are protein-coding genes. Add in the genes whose RNA does other things and the balance changes.

It changes even more if exactly what those RNA molecules do is examined. Single microRNAs, for example, often regulate the levels of hundreds of different proteins. They are like powerful strings controlling copious protein puppets. Super-imposed on this, some types of regulatory RNA edit other kinds of RNA. The effect of extra genes for both of these sorts of RNA molecules is therefore multiplicative rather than additive.

The picture that is emerging is thus one of “hard-wired” simple organisms, which mostly stick to using RNA for fetching and carrying, and “soft-wired” complex ones that employ it in a management capacity. In the complexity stakes, it is not how many protein-coding genes you have, but how you regulate them, that counts.

What's up, Doc?
Another consequence of RNA's rise to prominence is that researchers have a new source of explanations for illness. Small RNAs have been linked to many types of cancer, to genetic diseases of the central nervous system, and even to infections. Some scientists, for instance, think that RNA molecules help the protein that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to recruit non-infectious proteins to join its ranks.

The new RNA world is also a source of ideas about how diseases might one day be treated. In this line of work it is best to start simple, which is why the main hunt for new drugs centres on a technology called RNA interference, or RNAi (see article). This, in theory at least, promises to turn down the production of any single protein to very low levels. That distinguishes it from microRNAs, which control many proteins simultaneously.

A hypothetical RNAi drug might, for instance, become the ultimate analgesic by affecting the activity of SCN9A, a gene recently pinpointed as the reason why a Pakistani street performer—who put knives through his arms and walked on burning coals—could not feel pain. The technology has also helped over-eating mice stay slim and live a fifth longer. That was done by choking an insulin-receptor gene in the animals' fat cells. This made the cells less inclined to store every calorie. The technique has even created edible cottonseed (for anyone who might want to try it) by eliminating cotton's gossypol toxin. Not least, it can claim to have produced allergy-friendly soya beans, by turning off the gene that encodes the protein that provokes the reaction.

It is also a technology that can be used at one remove. Recently, Michael White of the University of Texas and his colleagues used RNAi not to treat lung cancer directly, but to convert tumorous cells that do not respond to Taxol, a widely used anti-cancer drug, into cells that are sensitive to it. They did this by silencing Taxol-suppressing genes that were usually active in those cancer cells.

RNAi drugs work by mugging another sort of RNA—one of the classes of the molecule discovered decades ago. These are the messenger-RNA molecules that shuttle information from DNA to the cell's protein factories. The drugs themselves are short pieces of RNA made of strands about 21 genetic letters long. What is unusual about these molecules is that they have two parallel strands, instead of a single one.

One of DNA's differences from RNA is that it comes as a double-stranded helix. Molecules of RNA usually have only a single strand. When a double-stranded RNAi drug enters a cell, an “argonaute” protein picks the molecule up and unzips it down the middle. It chops one strand in two and discards those remnants. The other strand acts as a guide for the argonaute. It can pair with a messenger-RNA molecule—at least, it can do so as long as this messenger contains a sequence of 21 letters that complement those of the drug.

When such RNA molecules do pair, the argonaute slices the messenger to oblivion like a sword-swinging samurai, just as it did with the other half of the original RNAi drug. Thus the gene whose message it was carrying is silenced. This is how RNAi drugs stop the production of disease-related proteins at source—they hold the tap turned off whereas most medicines try to mop up a continuous leak. Messenger destruction is specific because 21 letters of code are nearly always enough to identify the instructions for one type of protein over another.

The most probable explanation for RNAi is that it evolved as a defence against viruses. Double-stranded RNA is rare in nature, but viruses often make it when they reproduce. This means that organisms which have evolved the ability to recognise and destroy double-stranded RNA molecules have a competitive advantage over those that do not.

That is one example of the role of RNA in evolution. But there are many more. The evolution of microRNAs, for instance, underlines their importance in the origin of complexity. Their number appears to have ballooned when land plants and vertebrates evolved. But it is early days in this research. Dave Bartel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is surveying grand lists of small RNAs in mosses, flowers, worms, flies and mice in the hope that he will learn when different families of microRNAs emerged and which genes these microRNAs are regulating.

Dr Bartel has already discovered microRNA genes interspersed among sets of protein-encoding genes called Hox clusters. Hox clusters contain basic instructions about body plans, and the genes within them are arranged in the order in which they influence their owner's shape during development. In short, a Hox gene at one end of a cluster contains the information: “Give this embryo a head”. The gene at the other end says: “And a tail, too”. The role of the interspersed microRNAs is to regulate these high-level commands.

Ronald Plasterk, of the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, suggests that microRNAs are important in the evolution of the human brain. In December's Nature Genetics, he compared the microRNAs encoded by chimpanzee and human genomes. About 8% of the microRNAs that are expressed in the human brain were unique to it, much more than chance and the evolutionary distance between chimps and people would predict.

Such observations suggest evolution is as much about changes in the genes for small RNAs as in the genes for proteins—and in complex creatures possibly more so. Indeed, some researchers go further. They suggest that RNA could itself provide an alternative evolutionary substrate. That is because RNA sometimes carries genetic information down the generations independently of DNA, by hitching a lift in the sex cells. Link this with the fact that the expression of RNA is, in certain circumstances, governed by environmental factors, and some very murky waters are stirred up.

It's evolutionary, my dear Watson
What is being proposed is the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime, rather than as the result of chance mutations. This was first suggested by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, before Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection swept the board. However, even Darwin did not reject the idea that Lamarckian inheritance had some part to play, and it did not disappear as a serious idea until 20th-century genetic experiments failed to find evidence for it.

The wiggle room for the re-admission of Lamarck's ideas comes from the discovery that small RNAs are active in cells' nuclei as well as in their outer reaches. Greg Hannon, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, thinks that some of these RNA molecules are helping to direct subtle chemical modifications to DNA. Such modifications make it harder for a cell's code-reading machinery to get at the affected region of the genome. They thus change the effective composition of the genome in a way similar to mutation of the DNA itself (it is such mutations that are the raw material of natural selection). Indeed, they sometimes stimulate actual chemical changes in the DNA—in other words, real mutations.

Even this observation, interesting though it is, does not restore Lamarckism because such changes are not necessarily advantageous. But what Dr Hannon believes is that the changes in question sometimes happen in response to stimuli in the environment. The chances are that even this is still a random process, and that offspring born with such environmentally induced changes are no more likely to benefit than if those changes had been induced by a chemical or a dose of radiation. And yet, it is just possible Dr Hannon is on to something. The idea that the RNA operating system which is emerging into view can, as it were, re-write the DNA hard-drive in a predesigned way, is not completely ridiculous.

This could not result in genuine novelty. That must still come from natural selection. But it might optimise the next generation using the experience of the present one, even though the optimising software is the result of Darwinism. And if that turned out to be commonplace, it would be the paradigm shift to end them all.

Species inflation

2007-06-04T19:34:00.001-07:00

Species inflation

Hail Linnaeus
May 17th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Conservationists—and polar bears—should heed the lessons of economics

MEPL“NO SCIENCE in the world is more elevated, more necessary and more useful than economics.” That was the view of Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, born three centuries ago this week, who is better remembered for devising the system used to this day to classify living organisms.

Linnaeus sought to reveal what he saw as the divine order of the natural world so that it might be exploited for human benefit. He lived at a time when exploration and trade were bringing new specimens to the attention of European scientists. Those specimens, particularly the plants, were scrutinised as potential crops. At the turn of the 17th century there was no sense of how creatures were related to each other; descriptions and classifications were unsystematic. Linnaeus gave life to an organising hierarchy with kingdoms at the top and species at the bottom.

The system he created has proved both robust and flexible. It survived the rise of evolution. It also survived the discovery of whole categories of organism, such as bacteria, that the Swede never suspected existed. But, rather as John Maynard Keynes observed that “there is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency,” so Linnaeus's system is being subtly debauched by over-eager taxonomists, trying to help conservation.

Go forth and multiply
As new areas are explored, the number of species naturally increases (see article). For example, the number of species of monkey, ape and lemur gradually increased until the mid-1960s, when it levelled off. In the mid-1980s, however, it started rising again. Today there are twice as many primate species as there were then. That is not because a new wave of primatologists has emerged, pith-helmeted, from the jungle with hitherto unknown specimens. It is because a lot of established subspecies have been reclassified as species.

Perhaps “reclassified” is not quite the right word. “Rebranded” might be closer. Taxonomists do not always get it right first time, of course, and what looked like one species may rightly later be seen as two. But a suspiciously large number of the new species have turned up in the limited group of big, showy animals known somewhat disparagingly as “charismatic megafauna”—in other words the species that the public, as opposed to the experts, care about.

One reason for this taxonomic inflation is that the idea of a species becoming extinct is easy to grasp, and thus easy to make laws about. Subspecies just do not carry as much political clout. The other is that upgrading subspecies into species simultaneously increases the number of rare species (by fragmenting populations) and augments the biodiversity of a piece of habitat and thus its claim for protection.

In the short term, this strategy helps conservationists by intensifying the perceived threat of extinction. In the long term, as every economist knows, inflation brings devaluation. Rarity is not merely determined by the number of individuals in a species, it is also about how unusual that species is. If there are only two species of elephant, African and Indian, losing one matters a lot. Subdivide the African population, as some taxonomists propose, and perceptions of scarcity may shift.

The trouble is that the idea of what defines a species is a lot more slippery than you might think. Since it is changes in DNA that cause species to evolve apart, looking at DNA should be a good way to divide the natural world. However, it depends which bit of DNA you look at. The standard technique says, for example, that polar bears are just brown bears that happen to be white. This is not good news for those relying on the Endangered Species Act. For a certain sort of Colorado rodent (with, alas, a nose for prime riverfront real estate) the question of whether it is “Preble's meadow jumping mouse” or a boring old meadow jumping mouse may be a matter of life or death: local property developers are on the death side. The Bahamas switched overnight from protecting their raccoons to setting up programmes to eradicate them when a look at the genetic evidence showed the animals were common Northern raccoons, not a separate species.

The 21st-century answer to this 18th-century riddle is that a species is what a taxonomist says it is. Evolution often fails to produce the clear divisions that human thought in general, and the law in particular, prefers to work with. It therefore behoves taxonomists to be honest. If they debase their currency, it will ultimately become valueless. Linnaeus the economist would have known that instinctively.

SURVEY: CLIMATE CHANGE Selling hot air

2006-10-10T05:06:00.000-07:00

SURVEY: CLIMATE CHANGE

Selling hot air
Sep 7th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Kyoto's main achievement was to create a market in carbon. It's flawed, but better than nothing

THE huge hall at the Kölnmesse, Cologne's massive conference centre, looks like any other trade fair: rows of sellers' booths, some with buyers milling around them, some deserted. The participants' costume is a little unusual—not just the standard suits, but also chinos and T-shirts with green slogans. But what is being sold is very different: industrial gases to be captured from Chinese factories, trees to be planted in Africa, methane to be extracted from pig-effluent in Brazil. This is the carbon market, the main achievement of the Kyoto protocol.

Kyoto was a hard-fought attempt to do something immensely difficult: create a global mechanism for solving a long-term problem. Not surprisingly, its achievements have been limited. America and Australia did not ratify the treaty. Canada looks as though it may fail to comply. It signed up for a 6% reduction below 1990 levels by 2012, but the latest figures suggest that it is now running around 23% above 1990 levels. According to the new environment minister, Rona Ambrose, “it is impossible, impossible, for Canada to reach its Kyoto targets.”

Japan is supposed to be cutting its emissions to 6% below 1990 levels. It has no mandatory scheme, but many companies are participating in a voluntary one. Still, emissions are currently running at 24% above 1990 levels, so it will probably have to buy credits from other countries.

The EU has taken Kyoto most seriously. In 2005 it launched the European Emissions-Trading Scheme (ETS), which is supposed to cut emissions from the EU's five dirtiest industries. Most big European countries have additional schemes to penalise big CO2 emitters and to boost renewables, which is why wind farms are sprouting all over Europe. Some big European countries, such as Germany, France and Britain, are either near to meeting their targets or have already done so by cutting domestic emissions. Others, such as Spain and Italy, are further behind.

America was heavily involved in the design of the Kyoto protocol, and insisted that it should include the possibility of a market in emissions credits, on the ground that its trading scheme to reduce sulphur-dioxide emissions had been a big success. Europe reluctantly agreed and, once America walked away from Kyoto, turned out to be the mainstay of the carbon market that the protocol has created.

The carbon market works like any other commodity market: companies trade and the market sets prices. But it is unusual in that the commodity being bought and sold does not exist: it is the certified absence of carbon emissions. The market is big, and growing fast. In the first half of 2006, carbon to the value of €12 billion ($15 billion) was traded, five times more than in the same period in 2005.

There are two parts to the carbon market. The first, and largest in terms of cash, is the trade in allowances handed out to companies in the EU's five dirtiest industries under the ETS. Those companies have also been given emissions-reduction targets, which they can meet by cutting their own emissions, or by buying allowances from other companies, or by purchasing credits from developing countries. That is the second bit of the carbon market. The trade in allowances does not actually reduce emissions. The trade in developing-country credits does.

The Carbon Fair in Cologne, organised by the World Bank, is the annual get-together of the second bit of the market. The buyers are from the participants in Europe's ETS and Japan's voluntary-reduction scheme. The sellers are developing countries. The rich countries that ratified Kyoto are expected to produce 3.5 billion tonnes of carbon above their targets by 2012, so the prospects for sellers look good.

Some of the sellers at the Kölnmesse are more popular and better organised than others. The Chinese state planning committee stall has a glossy 200-page book crammed with projects, and a crowd of potential buyers. The man on the Senegalese stall has a photocopied piece of paper with six projects, and no customers.

The middlemen are niche investment banks, such as Climate Change Capital and Natsource, and project-management companies, such as Camco and AgCert. Camco, which floated earlier this year, works mainly in China. It identifies factories that emit lots of greenhouse gases and works out how to cut emissions; AgCert builds sealed pools to contain the pig-effluent in Brazil and Mexico, captures the methane it produces and burns it to produce electricity.

Projects have to be certified by the UN. Most involve cutting emissions not of CO2 but of more potent greenhouse gases. HFC, for example, an industrial gas, has 11,000 times the greenhouse effect of CO2. Some 58% of the credits sold between January 2005 and March 2006 were for HFC projects. Capturing it costs little—under $1 per tonne of CO2-equivalent—and selling it is lucrative. Thanks to the insatiable demand for credits, developing-country sellers have been getting up to $24 a tonne. Two Chinese deals alone, set up by the World Bank, which has put together a consortium of buyers, are worth $930m. At current prices, China is reckoned to have about $6 billion-7 billion-worth of HFCs that could be captured.

Not surprisingly, given both Chinese efficiency and the amount of dirty industry in the country, two-thirds of the deals signed between January 2005 and March 2006, by value, were with China. Keen to keep hold of the cash for its own purposes, the Chinese government has slapped a 65% tax on HFC projects and is funnelling the money into a “sustainable development” fund. “Sustainable development!” snorts a Chinese official. “It'll be spent on infrastructure.”

All right for some
Observers have three concerns about the carbon market. The first is about profits and prices. Giving the ETS allowances away (rather than auctioning them) made the scheme easy for the power-generators and other polluters to swallow. But it also, in effect, handed them wads of cash: they simply passed the extra costs on to consumers and pocketed the money. According to a report by IPA Energy Consulting, Britain's power-generation sector alone made a profit of around £800m ($1.5 billion) from the scheme in its first year.

Meanwhile, power prices went up steeply. According to a paper by Jos Sijm of the Energy Research Centre in the Netherlands, when allowances were €20 a tonne, European generators passed on between €1 and €19 per MWh to customers, depending on the structure of the market and the sources of electricity. In France, where the price is determined largely by carbon-free nuclear generation, they passed on least. In Germany, where it is largely determined by coal, they passed on most. Partly as a result, German off-peak electricity prices doubled in the two years to January 2006, to just over €40 per MWh, setting consumers squawking.

The second worry is about the purchase of credits from developing countries. Partly thanks to the Chinese government's 65% tax on emissions-reduction credits, European companies are paying many times the actual cost of reducing emissions. That price they pay is passed on to European consumers, who may eventually revolt when they realise how much money they are pouring into Chinese government coffers.

Third, the time-horizons for Kyoto (up to 2012) and, even more, for the ETS (whose first period runs only up to 2008) are too short. So whereas projects in the near term (such as capturing nasty Chinese gases) are financially worthwhile, longer-term ones that may be just as desirable (such as investing in cleaner power-generating plant) are not.

All that said, this is the first attempt to deal rationally with a hugely complex problem, so it would be odd if it did not encounter difficulties. And it has made some headway: last year it got rich-world consumers to invest $2.7 billion to cut developing-country greenhouse-gas emissions by around 374m tonnes of CO2 equivalent. That is only about half of Texas's annual emissions—but it's a start.

Aircraft emissions

2006-06-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

Aircraft emissions

The dirty sky
Jun 8th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Governments need to take action to cut aircraft emissions
aviation-images
ALL big ideas start life on the fringes of debate. Very often it takes a shocking event to move them into the mainstream. Until last year interest in climate change was espoused mainly by scientists and green lobbyists—and the few politicians they had badgered into paying attention. But since Hurricane Katrina, something seems to have changed, particularly in America. Nobody knows whether the hurricane really had anything to do with the earth warming. But for the first time less verdant voters and big business had a clearer idea about the “extreme weather events” whose increasing frequency scientists had been talking about.

There are plenty of anecdotal signs of change: Britain's pro-business Tories have turned green; Al Gore is back in fashion in America; hybrid cars no longer get stared at. Companies are beginning to take action (see article) and encouraging governments to do the same. Europe already has an emissions-trading system (ETS) for its five dirtiest industries. In America, although the Bush administration still resists federal legislation, more and more states do not. Even China has brought in a myriad of measures, including fuel-economy rules 20% tighter than America's.

So far the political rows about global warming have centred on two polluters, smoggy factories and dirty cars. Now a new front is being opened up—in the skies. Next month the European Parliament will vote on whether to extend its emissions-trading system to airlines. If it decides in favour, the whole industry will feel the impact, for it will affect not just European airlines but all those that fly into and out of the EU. Talk about this prospect soured the International Air Transport Association's annual meeting this week in Paris, where the lords of the skies would have otherwise congratulated themselves for surviving a wretched few years of terrorism threats, disease scares and rising fuel prices. But whatever happens in the EU, the airlines look set to face vociferous demands that they should pay for their emissions (see article).

A few clouds in the sky
In some ways, the airlines are an odd target for greens. They produce only around 3% of the world's man-made carbon emissions. Surface transport, by contrast, produces 22%. Europe's merchant ships spew out around a third more carbon than aircraft do, and nobody is going after them. And unlike cars—potent symbols of individualism (and, some would say, individual selfishness)—airlines are public transport, jamming in as many people as they can into each plane. By shipping hordes of ordinary people around the globe for not very much money, they have improved the lives of millions.

What's more, many air travellers cannot easily switch. Car drivers can hop on the train or the bus, but transatlantic travellers can't row from London to New York. Nor can aircraft fuel be swapped for a green alternative. Car drivers can buy electro-petrol hybrids but aircraft are, for now, stuck with kerosene, because its energy-density makes it the only practical fuel to carry around in the air.

Yet in other ways, airlines are a fine target. They pay no tax on fuel for international flights, and therefore escape the “polluter pays” principle even more niftily than other forms of transport. Their emissions are especially damaging, too—partly because the nitrogen oxides from jet-engine exhausts help create ozone, a potent greenhouse gas, and partly because the pretty trails that aircraft leave behind them help make the clouds that can intensify the greenhouse effect. And the industry's energy consumption has been growing faster than that of other polluting industries. Air transport will soon be central, not marginal, to the emissions issue.

Education, not regulation
What, if anything, should be done? As usual, there are dangers on both sides. Excessive regulation would unnecessarily restrict individual choice and throttle an industry that makes both rich and poor countries better off. On the other hand, airlines no less than any other industry must pay for pollution.

As the debate grows, some flyers may reconsider their ways. Put frankly, air travel makes a mockery of many people's attempts to live a green life. Somebody who wants to reduce his “carbon footprint” can bicycle to work, never buy aerosols and turn off his air-conditioner—and still blow away all this virtue on a couple of long flights. And, although other forms of transport cannot easily replace flying, demand for many flights is sensitive to price. A quarter of flying is business-related; many of those journeys are essential, but others achieve only marginally more than a telephone call or videoconference. As for stag-nights in Prague and student spring breaks in Jamaica—well, the gangs of drunken revellers probably wouldn't notice if they were in Blackpool or Daytona Beach instead, as indeed many were a decade ago.

However, addressing individuals' consciences won't go that far. Air pollution is a collective problem, which in this case requires government action—or, to be more accurate, a change in policy. As it stands, the market is skewed in favour of air travel; the aim should be to make it more balanced. Two approaches are on offer. Some think the best way to limit emissions is to tax them; others argue for a system that sets a cap on pollution, and lets polluters trade the right to emit.

This newspaper has long argued for a global carbon tax as a reasonable way to tax all forms of pollution. But there is no sign of governments embracing that idea. One of the strongest arguments for aircraft emissions being dealt with by a trading system is practical: a system already exists. Europe's ETS has many obvious flaws (see article). Given that it is the world's first serious attempt to cut emissions internationally, that is not surprising. The world can learn from its imperfections, and design a better scheme for airlines.

Slowly, businessmen and politicians are coming to agree with scientists. If this generation does not tackle climate change, its descendants will not think much of it. That means raising costs for all sources of pollution. Even those deceptively cheap weekend breaks cannot be exempt.

Democracy and Islam

2006-02-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

Democracy and Islam

The one thing Bush got right
Feb 2nd 2006
From The Economist print edition

For all his other foreign-policy mistakes, George Bush is right about democracy

“AND always keep a-hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.” To judge by their reaction to his state-of-the-union message, some critics of George Bush's foreign policy have been paying rather too much attention lately to Hilaire Belloc's rhyme. In his speech, Mr Bush said again that America was committed to the “historic long-term goal” of spreading democracy. But in the Middle East, ask his critics, hasn't his democracy agenda ushered in something worse than the previous pattern of rule by strongmen: the rise in Iraq, Egypt and now Palestine of a form of political Islam that is hostile both to the West and to the underlying values of democracy itself?

The detailed answer to this question has to be long, if only because the thing people call “political Islam” comes in so many different shapes and sizes (see article). The short answer, however, is no. Mr Bush has made many big mistakes in the Middle East. They range from inept planning and follow-through in Iraq to supine neglect of Palestine. But his democratisation policy is not one of them. In fact, it may be the one big thing that this president has got right in the region.

The least bad system
Democracy's defining feature—the freedom to hire and fire your government—does not guarantee that countries will make wise choices, or that democracies will be good neighbours. The lesson of the 20th century is that no people is immune from falling under the spell of some hypnotic voice or pernicious doctrine. In 1933 Germans freely elected the Nazi Party, which went on to reduce Europe to rubble. But only the most twisted history could blame democracy rather than dictatorship for the depredations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong. The merits of democracy are obvious and the appeal of it seems universal. So why do the familiar arguments have to be rehashed all over again in the case of the Middle East?

One reason people on the left object to Mr Bush's “freedom agenda” is that they see it as a veil for something else: an American policy of stomping about the world deposing unfriendly regimes at will. If such a policy existed, it would be wrong. But Mr Bush's agenda so far consists mainly of using the bully pulpit of superpowerdom to extol democracy's virtues. His administration has deposed only two regimes—the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—and in neither case was spreading democracy his principal motive, given or real. It was much more old-fashioned than that.

Rightly or wrongly, both regimes were seen as threats to America. Afghanistan, which gave safe haven to al-Qaeda, surely was. As for Iraq, when weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise, Mr Bush talked up the humanitarian case for having got rid of Mr Hussein and conveniently forgot about his WMD case. To that extent, he is to blame for the cynicism his freedom talk now engenders. But the fact remains that he had to install some sort of successor regime in these two countries, and instead of imposing a friendly strongman, as America did in cold-war days, he plumped for democracy. Some of the consequences are messy. It was presumably no part of Mr Bush's design to deliver power in Iraq to Islamists friendly to Iran's ayatollahs. But the decision to allow Afghans and Iraqis a free choice was surely right in principle.

Will it turn out right in practice? Here from the opposite direction comes a second criticism, this time from the foreign-policy realists. However fine in the abstract, democracy is delivering dangerous results. Fanatical religious types rather than secular liberals are expanding into the space American guns and influence have forced open in the politics of Iraq, Egypt and Palestine. This will split multi-sectarian Iraq apart, set Arab against Jew in Palestine and deliver Egypt into the anti-western hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like Jimmy Carter's human-rights foreign policy in the 1970s, George Bush's democracy policy will be remembered for its dangerous naivety—a luxury a superpower cannot afford.

Even in the Middle East
In time, the realists may be proved right. An Arab country might one day vote in an al-Qaeda government and make war on America. But where is their evidence? Having attempted an insurrection in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda is growing less popular there. Iraq under the dictator was neither at peace nor friendly to the West; the present haggling between elected parties may be the only realistic way to bind a fissiparous country together. In Egypt, the good showing of the Brotherhood in December's election was a salutary warning to the eternally ruling Hosni Mubarak that it is not such a clever idea to keep locking up your liberal opponents. Where Islamists do well, it is often because they are the only opposition left standing.

As for last week's election in the Palestinian territories, this did not create the Hamas problem: the organisation was murdering Israelis long before winning power. It remains to be seen whether victory will make it more murderous. Having to keep voters sweet may instead force it to pay less heed to its ideology of destroying Israel and more to the Palestinians' real needs and achievable goals. If it does not change it can be cajoled and punished accordingly. A democratic mandate does not license any government to make war on its neighbour or ignore its obligations under international law.

It is sometimes argued that political Islam is itself a pernicious doctrine, logically incompatible with the values of democracy, and that this is what makes its promotion in the Arab world a futile exercise. Many Islamists do insist that because God alone can make law, men who make their own laws are apostates. But this idea is held only by a minority in the world of Islam, where democracy has in recent years both spread and put down powerful roots in countries as far apart as Turkey and Indonesia. There is no obvious reason why the Arab world must remain an exception.

Holding elections is not a panacea. Democracy cannot at a stroke heal national conflicts, create civic institutions or modernise traditional societies. But whatever else people think of Mr Bush, on this one thing—the universal potential and appeal of the democratic idea—he is on the side of history.

Destitution not dearth

2005-11-28T22:27:00.000-08:00

Destitution not dearth
Aug 18th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Niger's harvest last year was not so terrible. Why is the country now so hungry?

“MUCH about poverty is obvious enough,” wrote Amartya Sen, one of the world's best-known and most respected economists, in his 1982 classic, “Poverty and Famines”. “One does not need elaborate criteria, cunning measurement, or probing analysis to recognise raw poverty and to understand its antecedents.” But the thesis Mr Sen propounded in that book was not obvious at all: some of the worst famines, he argued, have taken place without any significant fall in the supply of food.

One of the examples Mr Sen chose to illustrate his thesis was a famine that gathered force from 1968 to 1973 in the Sahel region of Africa. The Sahel, from the Arabic word for “shore”, typically refers to a group of six countries on the western fringes of the Sahara, where the desert sands lap up against the vegetation of Africa's semi-arid zones. The countries worst affected by this disaster 30 years ago were Mauritania, Mali, Upper Volta (now called Burkina Faso)—and Niger.

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Niger is once again in the grip of a food crisis, if not a full-blown famine. The distress sales of livestock, the heavy migration and the deprivation the country suffered in the early 1970s have all revisited it again this year. How well does Mr Sen's thesis explain the country's latest encounter with mass hunger?

Much about Niger's current crisis appears obvious enough: the rains last year ended early; the locusts were rampant. Who can be surprised that the country is short of food? But Niger's harvest last November was merely mediocre, not disastrous. Although the rains ended early, the country's cereal production was only about 11% below its five-year average, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). It was 22% greater than the harvest of 2000-01, a year that passed without alarm. The locusts did more damage to the region's fodder than to its food, prompting pastoralists and their herds to begin an early migration to greener pastures in Niger's coastal neighbours.

Purchasing powerlessness
Niger's distress shows up most clearly in prices, not quantities. A pastoralist's terms of trade depend on two prices in particular: the price of what he can sell (his livestock) and the price of what he must buy (food). In Niger this year, the latter has soared; the former has plummeted. According to one report, the price of millet and sorghum rose to 75-80% above its average for the last five years. By June, the sale of one goat bought half as much millet as it had six months earlier. It is precisely this kind of cruel twist in the terms of trade, Mr Sen argued, that can bring a community to its knees. These unfortunates will suffer a lack of power to purchase food, even if there is no lack of food to purchase. Why did prices move against Niger's pastoralists so far and so fast?

The spike in the food price may have reflected high foreign demand as much as low domestic supply. Traditionally, during the lean months before their harvest, Niger's farmers import cereals that are cheaper to grow in wetter, coastal neighbouring countries than in their own country. But according to CILSS, an intergovernmental body responsible for the region's food security, significant amounts of grain have this year been flowing in the opposite direction. Ghana, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria have all been buying up grain in the region.

This is partly because these countries' own harvests were disappointing. But in Nigeria's case, the FAO thinks that government policies were also to blame. Nigeria has imposed controls on imports of rice and wheat products; it has also taken steps to protect and promote its millers and poultry farmers. Both of these policies have raised demand in the country for millet and sorghum, which provide alternative sources of flour as well as chicken-feed. As a result, Nigerian cereals that might have found their way to Niger are instead being consumed at home. Nigeria has twice Niger's income per head and more than ten times its population. Its powerful market pull may have helped to undermine the purchasing power of Niger's pastoralists. “In the fight for market command over food,” Mr Sen noted in his book, “one group can suffer precisely from another group's prosperity, with the Devil taking the hindmost.”

Nigeria, with Burkina Faso and Mali, has also restricted grain exports to Niger this year, violating its trade treaties with the country. Such restrictions have often played an ignoble, supporting role in the history of famine. A ban on cereal exports between India's provinces, for example, condemned Bengal to ruinously high prices in its great famine of 1943.

What of the other term in the terms of trade? Livestock prices have fallen in the past year, partly because northern pastures were damaged and animals were emaciated as a result. But the deterioration in the terms of trade can also generate its own momentum. Higher cereals prices prompt herdsmen to sell more of their livestock. These distress sales drive the price of animals down further, forcing pastoralists to sell still more of their herd. In his book, Mr Sen raised the theoretical possibility that a pastoralist's supply curve might actually bend back on itself: as the relative price of livestock falls, a hungry pastoralist might supply more animals to the market, not fewer as elementary economic principles would imply.

If mass hunger were simply the result of there not being enough to eat, the remedy would be obvious: more food. The emergency rations now being shipped, flown and trucked into the Sahel are indeed necessary and urgent by the time hunger and destitution are acute and widespread. But if mass hunger begins with a collapse in purchasing power, rather than a shortage of food, it does not take an airlift to prevent it. What is needed is a way to restore lost purchasing power by, for example, offering employment, at a suitable wage, on public works. The market respects demand, not need. But give the needy enough pull in the market, and the market will do most of the rest.

People power

2005-11-26T03:13:00.000-08:00

People power
Nov 24th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Two academics use game theory to explain why democracy is so hard to achieve

Reuters

IN 1381, a mob of angry Essex peasants revolted against the poll tax, and marched on London, destroying tax registers and records as they went. The Essex men wanted an end to their serfdom and the right to rent land at fourpence an acre. King Richard II, just 14 years old, bowed to their demands and the mob dispersed, although not before invading the Tower of London, trespassing on the royal bedchambers, and killing the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The conflict between mutinous masses and self-preserving elites is the theme of this ambitious, even audacious, book by Daron Acemoglu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and James Robinson, of Harvard University. Their aim is to figure out when such struggles result in democracy, and when that democracy endures. The peasants' revolt of 1381 was not such a case. Once the uprising had ebbed, the young monarch reneged on his promises to the Essex men, rounded up the surviving ringleaders and had them executed.

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As this sorry episode shows, people power is fleeting; sullen discontent flares only rarely and briefly into forceful dissent. This is obviously a problem for rebels, who find it hard to sustain a revolt. But, as this book points out, it also poses a conundrum for the elites who might want to appease them.

It is a king's or dictator's prerogative to change his mind. As the sovereign, he can overrule everyone, including himself. Thus after an insurrection peters out, the sovereign cannot hold himself to any concessions he might have made when the rebels were at his bedroom door. Dissidents should anticipate this. If they do not want to meet the same fate as the Essex men of 1381, they should not settle for the ruler's sops, but push instead for outright revolution while they still can.

This dilemma sets up the book's main thesis: democracy is a solution to the elite's commitment problem. By agreeing to a peaceful extension of the franchise, the elites institutionalise their concessions, and the masses lock in their power before it drifts away. Institutions, such as universal suffrage, are harder to overturn than policies, such as rent of fourpence an acre. It is easy, all too easy, for the elite to renege on a promise to the people; rather harder for it to mount a coup against them.

Uncircumscribed authority can be a handicap. It makes it impossible for the sovereign to make a lasting concession even if he wants to. Such paradoxes are familiar to students of game theory, a subdiscipline of economics on which the authors draw heavily. Game theory sheds light on strategic encounters, in which each player's move must take account of the others'; it is a good way to explore the machinations and manoeuvres of politics.

The authors hope to convert readers to their method as well as their argument. The pace of the book suffers from this laudable pedagogical purpose. They tell the reader what they are going to say, say it, then tell the reader they've said it. Their technical apparatus, like scaffolding, is no doubt a great help in building their theory. But an awful lot of scaffolding is left out on show, which is a great help to anyone teaching this book, but a distraction for those who just want to admire the edifice.

And there is much to admire. True to their title, Messrs Acemoglu and Robinson offer a unified theory of both democracy and its opposite. Some Latin American countries have swung between the two with metronomic regularity. Argentines won universal male suffrage as early as 1912, but lost it to a coup in 1930. Democracy was restored in 1946, overthrown in 1955, re-introduced in 1973, subverted in 1976 and cemented, one hopes, in 1983.

In the authors' eyes, the demise of democracy is a near mirror image of the fall of dictatorship. Anxious incumbents try to buy off the military, much as Richard II sought to placate the Essex men. Chile's Salvador Allende, for example, raised army pay and benefits. But in the long run, a democracy cannot commit itself to serve the interests of anyone but the swing voters. The military elite know this, and take their chances when they can. Allende was duly deposed in 1973.

The book takes its title from “The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy” by Barrington Moore, an American sociologist who died last month. The conclusion of that treatise has been summed up as: “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” Messrs Acemoglu and Robinson agree that the middle class can be a midwife for democratic rule, not least because the elite is more willing to cede power to merchants than to the mob. They also agree with Moore that agrarian societies tend towards authoritarianism. Land is easier to expropriate than capital; and peasants are easier to repress than factory workers. Thus feudal lords fear democracy more than capitalists do; and have an easier time suppressing it.

Such bold generalisations and pithy dictums have fallen out of fashion since Moore wrote his classic in 1966. One more recent scholar counted no fewer than 27 different factors that are said to promote democracy. This book is entirely free of such intellectual indecision. The authors are brutal wielders of Occam's razor, and the 27 factors have been chopped down to a coherent handful. This may leave a lot out, but what historians bemoan as simplistic, economists tend to celebrate as parsimonious. According to two scholars cited in this book, even to look for a general theory of democratic reform requires great temerity. Happily, Messrs Acemoglu and Robinson have temerity in spades.

After Pope John Paul II

2005-10-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Apr 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition

A new pope must think differently about how to preserve life in places where it is most at risk

WE SHALL not see his like again. In the case of Pope John Paul II, that is not merely a platitude; it is a hard statement of fact. As the world bids farewell to a titan of the 20th century, people already sense that, in the coming decades, things will be different. Not only because the challenges facing mankind, and the church, are more diffuse than before, and at least as formidable—but also because John Paul's charisma, even if it could be reproduced, would not suffice to tackle them.

For hundreds of millions of Catholics, their spiritual leader's huge role in history is a source of legitimate pride. Having endured the worst tyrannies of the century—Nazism and Communism—he epitomised the possibility of prevailing in the direst situations. He lived long enough to see, and brilliantly exploit, a moment when Europe had a chance to slay the totalitarian beast; and his careful, pivotal intervention in Eastern Europe proved, to many, that moral and spiritual forms of power can win out against political tyranny.

As a celebrity of the electronic age, he used its devices with skill, while turning the logic of stardom upside down. Having stepped on to the world stage as a figure who impressed by his good looks and athletic prowess, he abandoned it in a state of deliberately publicised enfeeblement and pain. This sent two signals, both hard to understand except in the context of the highest Christian ideals: first, that “God's strength is made perfect in our weakness”, and second, that death is merely the gateway, never to be feared, to a different and more abundant life. These messages can sound repulsive on the lips of a person who is materially and physically secure, preaching to people who are neither. John Paul seemed vulnerable enough to speak with integrity, whether or not you agreed with him.

Hardening the edges
For some Catholics, the unrepeatable quality of this papacy may also be a source of quiet relief. That is an understandable sentiment in regions where the Vatican has lent support to dictators or their clerical apologists, and in places where the church seems to have ignored or even exacerbated the problems of the most vulnerable, especially women.

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What of those who are neither Catholic, nor Christian, nor believers in any religion? Is it possible for those who regard the popes' claim to be the representatives of God on earth as wrong, or simply nonsensical, to view with some respect the papacy of John Paul, and the church he remoulded?

In many new ways, the pope did reach out to other religions, and to mankind as a whole. Compared with centuries past, his church has taken a kinder view of people outside its ranks. Yet it could not be said that he blurred the boundaries between belief and non-belief. He taught that man's principal woe was not poverty, or war, but the abandonment of the divine. That is a controversial view, to put it mildly. To the secular mind, the pursuit of happiness and liberty consists mainly of removing every obstacle to their enjoyment; for the likes of John Paul, all that is an illusion, and freedom lies in doing the will of God. Such differences can hardly be air-brushed away.

In democracies, communities with varying beliefs about ultimate questions can live together in a spirit of respect, if not always in amity—even when different beliefs imply different individual choices. If you see life as a gift from God, you will probably not make the same choices about the reproduction of life, and its termination, as you would if you saw existence on earth as your own to regulate as far as possible. Even here, the possibility of mutual respect exists.

In practice, though, belief also has intractable implications for public policy, and the high salience of religious faith—in the uncompromising form which John Paul professed—has lent a new rancour to the politics of many democracies. States have to decide whether to allow euthanasia; whether to accord same-sex unions the same rights as traditional ones; and whether to allow and fund the termination of pregnancy. Though stable democracies have transparent ways of resolving such disputes, arguments about them are often held in a spirit of mutual demonisation. The church, an undemocratic institution with uncompromising views, has not helped their peaceful resolution, especially in the United States.

A force for good?
In the developing world, questions about the role of John Paul's church—about whether it is, on balance, a force for good or the opposite—are even harder to finesse. In the slums of Brazil or the war zones of Africa, the way the church works is a huge and sharp question, because so little else works. Therein lies a contribution to human welfare which non-Catholics can admire. In rural Congo, where government barely exists, the church often acts as sole provider of medicine and schools. In Zimbabwe, where government is murderous, the church has resisted tyranny. Yet the vast influence of the church in poor countries obliges people to look critically at how that influence is used. To non-Catholics, and to many Catholics, it seems obvious that the rigid application of the church's teaching on contraception has contributed to many deaths.

The church would enhance its moral authority if it could accept the common-sense proposition that sexual acts with a high and avoidable chance of transmitting HIV are a worse evil than the use of condoms, even if it continues to defy secular common sense in insisting that the use of condoms is wrong. To say this would not imply endorsing promiscuity or abandoning the Christian ideals of chastity and fidelity.

The church can retort that its concern is with intrinsic right and wrong, not with a mathematical calculus of effects. But in arguing thus, the church is unfair to itself. Its armoury includes powerful moral and intellectual tools, designed to distinguish greater evils from lesser ones, at times when no solution is easy—and the consequences of each option must be weighed. In the case of AIDS, the horror of the consequences is obvious to believers and secularists alike. That is why everyone who cares about humanity, whether in God's name or in the name of reason, will rejoice if, under a new pope, the church seeks new ways to affirm the sanctity of life.

Rules of engagement

2005-08-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

Jul 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Scientists find surprising regularities in war and terrorism

ON JULY 19th, IraqBodyCount, a group of academics who are attempting to monitor the casualties of the conflict in that country, published a report suggesting that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed in it so far. In other words, 34 a day. But that is an average. On some days the total is lower, and on some higher—occasionally much higher.

It is this variation around the mean that interests Neil Johnson of the University of Oxford and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College, London. They think it is possible to trace and model the development of wars from the patterns of casualties they throw up. In particular, by analysing IraqBodyCount's data and comparing them with equivalent numbers from the conflict in Colombia, they have concluded that, from very different beginnings, these conflicts are evolving into something rather similar to one another.

The groundwork for this sort of study was laid by Lewis Fry Richardson, a British physicist, with a paper on the mathematics of war that was published in 1948. Using data from conflicts that took place between 1820 and 1945, Fry Richardson made a graph displaying the number of wars that had death tolls in various ranges. The outcome was startling: rather than varying wildly or chaotically, the probability of individual wars having particular numbers of casualties followed a mathematical relationship known as a power law.

Power-law relationships crop up in many fields of science and are often a characteristic of complex and highly interacting systems (which war certainly is). Earthquake frequencies and stockmarket fluctuations are both described by power laws, for example. Power laws also have properties that make them different from statistical distributions such as the normal curve (or bell curve, as it is familiarly known). Unlike a bell curve, a power-law distribution has only one tail and no peak. Small tremors occur frequently, but over a few decades enormously large earthquakes will also occur with reasonable frequency. As will deadly wars and attacks.

In May, Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young, of the University of New Mexico, modified Fry Richardson's method to look at terrorist attacks. Instead of total casualties in a conflict, they plotted the deaths from individual incidents. Again, they got a power law. Actually, they got two. Power-law relationships are characterised by a number called an index. For each ten-fold increase in the death toll, the probability of such an event occurring decreases by a factor of ten raised to the power of this index, which is how the distributions get their name. Terrorist attacks within G7 countries could be distinguished from those inside non-G7 countries by their different indices. G7 countries were more likely to suffer large attacks. Indeed, in an article published earlier this year by Britain's Institute of Physics, Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell said that “if we assume that the scaling relationship and the frequency of events do not change in the future, we can expect to see another attack at least as severe as September 11th within the next seven years.”

Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat took the method a couple of steps further. They extended Mr Clauset's and Mr Maxwell's idea of looking at the sizes of individual incidents within a campaign to other sorts of conflict, and also looked at how those conflicts have changed over time. As they report in a paper published recently in arXiv, an online archive, they found, yet again, that the data follow power laws. And for both of the wars they studied, the indices of those power laws have been approaching the value Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell found for non-G7 terrorism, though from different directions. In other words, for the war in Iraq, the data indicate a transition from an index characteristic of more lethal, conventional war between armies to one closer to terrorism. No real surprise there, perhaps, though it is interesting to see perceptions on the ground reflected in the maths. For the Colombian conflict, though, the data show the opposite, a transition from a war characterised by smaller, less cohesive forces to a more unified rebel front—something that ought to worry Colombia's government.

Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat put forward as an explanation a mathematical model they have developed. It consists of a group of self-contained “attack units”, each of a particular strength. Such units can join together or fragment into smaller pieces. Over time, an equilibrium of joining and breaking is reached, but where that equilibrium lies depends on the strength of any central organisation. The model explains the power-law behaviour seen in both conventional wars and terrorist attacks. Different rates of fragmentation lead to different indices—conventional war is fought with robust armies that are unlikely to fragment, while terrorists are more likely to have shifting alliances.

Dr Spagat points out that, if their model is correct, it makes casualty data useful in a situation where intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by—as seems to be the case in Iraq at the moment. For instance, it should be possible to distinguish an insurgency with a rigid command structure from a group of smaller, randomly linked units. Learning about the distribution of earthquakes may not prevent the Big One, but for war and terrorism, power-law statistics may teach governments something about how to defeat the enemy, and make war less deadly

2005-06-28T00:21:00.000-07:00

fish

Sunbus

God under Howard

2005-05-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

God under Howard

May 5th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The prime minister keeps on winning elections because he understands how Australia has changed

Newspix

God loves us

TEN minutes into the service, and several young women are openly weeping. Others are collapsing into their seats, apparently in religious ecstasy. Almost everyone is reaching out with their arms, palm forward, hoping perhaps to touch the face of God, but lending the proceedings an oddly sinister air. Welcome to Hillsong, said to be Australia's fastest-growing church, having risen from a congregation of 45 when it first started in 1983 to more than 15,000 now. Well over 2,000 people pack into its hangar-like hall in an inner suburb of Sydney for just one of five Sunday services, each 90 minutes long. Afterwards they queue to buy recordings of the sermon they have heard in the flesh only minutes earlier. Not one but two collections have been taken.

Hillsong tells people what they want to hear: that God loves them, that they are special, that if they believe they will prosper. Not much is said about loving your neighbour as yourself—or indeed about an austere and unworldly man named Jesus. Pastor Brian Houston, who founded Hillsong, once wrote a book called “You Need More Money”. This is not so much religion but self-help for the would-be affluent. But with its heavy-rock hymns of praise to the bountiful Father, its massed choirs, its dancers and its howling preachers, there is no denying that, on a certain level, it works.

It may be tempting to dismiss Hillsong as an extreme example of “prosperity Christianity” and ignore it, but John Howard and his Liberals certainly haven't. In 2002, when Hillsong opened a new, bigger complex in north-western Sydney, Mr Howard came along to open it. Peter Costello, the treasurer, has spoken at Hillsong's annual conference. In fact, many members of the Howard cabinet are devout Christians (although Mr Howard himself is somewhat ambivalent). In Canberra these days, political prayer breakfasts have become unmissable.

Yet the place hardly seems to be in the grip of the religious right. A couple of miles from the Hillsong church is Oxford Street, with a high concentration of gay bars and clubs: Sydney and San Francisco still vie with each other for the title of the world's gay capital. Those otherwise inclined would not have to walk far to find a number of entirely legal brothels. Australia's evangelical churches may be booming, but the country still embraces staunchly liberal values. Yes, Tony Abbott, the health minister (and a former monk), has been allowed, from time to time, to raise the subject of abortion. But no one seriously believes that the Howard government is going to open that Pandora's box. Yes, Family First, a new party of the right, picked up a Senate seat in last year's election. But the Senate's election rules are so strange that such quirks can happen—and then fizzle out again.

The attention paid to Hillsong is a symptom of something much broader: Mr Howard and his party have understood, and profited from, a big shift in Australian attitudes. When he first came to power, he said he wanted to preside over an Australia that was “relaxed and comfortable”, a remark that was much derided at the time, but has come in a way to define his leadership. After the economic upheavals of the 1980s and early 1990s, Australians now want to turn inwards a little and concentrate on their own families and homes, says Hugh Mackay, a social researcher and journalist. Not for nothing has “Backyard Blitz” been one of the most popular television programmes of recent years, at a time when six of Australia's top ten charities have seen their takings fall.

By 1996, Labor had alienated too many Australian battlers with its obsessions with ending the monarchy, declaring Australia part of Asia and apologising to its Aborigines—none of which are “barbecue stoppers”, as Mr Howard would say. The secret of his success, he insists, is that he listens to people, not least by frequently going on “talk-back” (phone-in) radio. “We've ended the perpetual seminar on our identity,” he claims.

From the suburbs
With four general-election victories under his belt, Mr Howard is probably the most successful serving democratic leader in the world—and most observers reckon he intends to run for a fifth term in 2007. The secret of his success is to be found in the suburbs, the vast sprawling expanses of Australia's five big cities, and most of all in Sydney. It is pre-eminently here, in the Sydney suburbs, that Australian elections are won and lost. And it is here that the Liberals have made deep inroads into what was once solid Labor territory.

Liberal politics, reckons one pundit, is about ignoring the people who are never going to vote for you, ignoring the people who are always going to vote for you and concentrating on those in the middle. In the run-up to last October's election, the government targeted the kind of lower-middle-class young families who live in the Sydney suburbs. It announced huge give-aways for families and tax breaks for middle-income earners. In all, it promised an extra A$66 billion ($51 billion) over four years. It seemed to work.

Increasingly, the suburbs are places not of deprivation, but of aspiration. Take Campbelltown, a district in south-west Sydney that falls partly within the national constituency of Werriwa, the seat once held by Gough Whitlam, Labor's 1970s prime minister, and more recently by Mark Latham, who led Labor to catastrophic defeat in last October's general election. The Liberal Party hardly bothers to campaign here: at the Werriwa by-election in March, held to replace Mr Latham, who quit Parliament, it did not even field a candidate.

Even so, on the Campbelltown council Labor cannot muster a majority. Campbelltown's Labor mayor, Brenton Banfield, is honest enough to acknowledge that Mr Howard makes a good job of coming across as “an average bloke”, the sort that understands the suburbs. He is right, because that is where the prime minister comes from. He is the son of a garage owner from the Sydney suburbs, whereas his opponent, Kim Beazley, is the son of a Perth MP and minister.

And although Campbelltown has its pockets of high unemployment—you even see the odd graffito in Glenquarry Estate—most of it looks prosperous, and is becoming more so. Its green hills are alive with the sound of building, and its ritzier areas, such as Denham Court, are the site of amazing mansions built by local people who have made good. Will such people go on voting Labor? Perhaps not.

It is often said that Mr Howard keeps on winning elections because of the economy, stupid. But it isn't quite that simple. Of course a 14-year boom helps, but voters seem to realise full well that the groundwork was laid by Labor's reforms. Labor now has to do more than just convince voters that it can handle the economy as well as the Liberals; it needs to convince ordinary middle-class people that it understands their concerns. The trouble is that too many of Labor's leaders are creatures of the trade unions: at worst, apparatchiks such as Simon Crean, a former leader of both the trade-union movement and of the Labor party and now shadow trade minister; at best dependent on union money and votes. Yet only 23% of the workforce are unionised.

The enduring power of the unions was neatly demonstrated in January, when Labor had to choose a new leader following the resignation of Mark Latham, who had led them to defeat in last October's election. The man they should have chosen was Kevin Rudd, by far the brightest talent on the Labor front bench. But Mr Rudd is a former diplomat, not a union man. Insiders say that he was in with a chance until the Queensland unions more or less ordered their MPs not to support him, handing victory to Kim Beazley, the veteran former leader whom Mr Howard has defeated twice before.

That said, the present opposition front bench looks a good deal less union-dominated than in the past, and now boasts some impressive talent, including Mr Rudd, Wayne Swan, the shadow treasurer, and Stephen Smith, the shadow minister for industry.

Another factor against Labor is Australia's federal system. The state governments spend the money that touches people's everyday lives: on local roads, on schools, on doctors' surgeries (though not on universities). Federal government spending goes on things that seem more remote, such as defence and foreign policy, as well as macro-economic management.

Bill Bowtell, a political consultant, borrows a line from an American columnist, Maureen Dowd, to describe state governments as the natural province of “Mummy” parties—sympathetic and happiest when doling out wads of cash—whereas the federal government is best suited to “Daddy” parties: stern, moralistic, taking tough and unpopular decisions. That is why, he reckons, the Liberal-led coalition has been in power in Canberra for 34 of the past 50 years, against Labor's 16, and why Labor controls every one of Australia's state governments.

There is, though, a little hope for the opposition. Labor has at least started to understand that it cannot afford to cede the economy entirely to the Liberals. Mr Swan, the new shadow treasurer, has been banging away at the government for not investing enough, to some effect.

Mr Beazley has a fine line in indignation when he savages the government for squandering Labor's legacy by failing to invest and using its surpluses for questionable projects in marginal constituencies. But too often, Labor still talks in terms of insiders and outsiders. The problem is that most Australians now consider themselves neither; they simply feel classless and successful. Perhaps Australia has just become more selfish. If so, that is both parties' doing; but Mr Howard's has been much better at exploiting it.

Economics focus - The regulators' best friend?

2005-04-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

Economics focus

The regulators' best friend?

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Europeans embrace the logic of cost-benefit analysis just as some Americans grow suspicious of it

ACCORDING to one of the European Commission's pettifogging regulations, cucumbers sold in the single market cannot be too curvy. According to another proposal, packets of coffee and chicory must conform to weights specified in Brussels.

The first regulation is largely apocryphal, a myth propagated by Euro-sceptic newspapers in Britain and debunked by the commission's team of counter-spinners. But the second regulation is quite real. It was one of several examples of regulatory overkill lambasted by Günter Verheugen, a vice-president of the commission, in a speech last month. Mr Verheugen wants to withdraw such needless regulations, simplify others and subject new proposals to “solid cost-benefit analyses”.

Mr Verheugen has called for better regulation by the European Commission. See also “In Defence of the Economic Analysis of Regulation”, published by the American Enterprise Institute, and the Centre for Progressive Regulation’s cost benefit analysis.

Cost-benefit analysis—which typically quantifies the attractions and drawbacks of a regulation, converts them into dollars or euros, then tots them up—sounds both dull and innocuous. But its findings can be revealing. For example, Robert Hahn, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, calculates that over 40% of American regulations impose costs that outweigh the benefits they confer*. What might a similar review of the European Union's regulatory rule-book reveal? How many of the 90,000 pages of the acquis communautaire might be safely torn out, to the net benefit of the union?

The findings of Mr Hahn and other cost-benefit analysts in America have not passed unchallenged, however. A number of critics doubt the worth of the techniques and distrust the motives of the practitioners. They say that America's current administration is guilty of “regulatory underkill” and that cost-benefit analysis is its weapon of choice.

Whether or not this is fair to President George Bush's administration, is it fair to cost-benefit analysis? Is the method fatally flawed and intrinsically anti-regulatory? The Centre for Progressive Regulation (CPR), a think-tank that shelters many sceptics, thinks so. It objects to two features in particular: the “translation of lives, health, and the natural environment into monetary terms” and “the discounting of harms to human health and the environment that are expected to occur in the future”†.

Those who question cost-benefit analysis doubt that a price tag can ever be put on life. How could one seriously count the cost of death and injury caused by road accidents, for example? But, as Robert Frank, an economist now at Cornell University, has pointed out, even the fiercest critics do not get their brakes checked every morning. They have more pressing uses of their time. Road safety, then, does have an opportunity cost, and an economist will want to know what it is. Thus, when the CPR accuses economists of “pricing the priceless”, most economists would plead guilty as charged. They devote considerable effort, and not a little ingenuity, to discovering the implicit price of many things that are not traded directly in arm's-length markets.

As the critics allege, cost-benefit analysis works like a kind of universal solvent. It breaks qualities down into quantities, differences of kind into differences of degree, gold into base metal. A safe childhood, a breathtaking view, a clean pair of lungs—all are reduced to fungible “dollar-equivalents”. In doing so, the method forces into the open trade-offs that many would rather not face too squarely. Should taxpayers' money be devoted to keeping grandmother alive for an extra month in an intensive-care unit? Or would it be better spent reducing the risk of asthma faced by deprived children in the polluted inner city? Such comparisons may seem crass. But they are democratic.

The less sweet hereafter
Accused of pricing the priceless, economists are charged with under-pricing the future as well. Most practitioners of cost-benefit analysis assume that gains in the hereafter are worth less today than gains in the here-and-now. They discount future benefits, including lives saved, in much the same way that they discount future profits or costs.

Those who question cost-benefit analysis doubt that a price tag can ever be put on life

But are lives saved 12 months' hence really worth less than lives saved this year? To say so, the critics argue, is to make a false analogy between financial resources, which can be borrowed from, or invested for, the future, and human life, which cannot. By discounting future lives, economists also further an anti-regulatory agenda, the critics allege. After all, the costs of most health and safety regulations arrive upfront. The benefits can take time to emerge.

Discounting future lives is indeed awkward, and some economists have fretted about it for decades. But it is not necessarily anti-regulatory. If regulators discounted costs, but not lives saved, they would defer action indefinitely, Mr Hahn points out. The benefits would be the same if they waited a year (or a decade, for that matter) but the costs would always be less.

Cost-benefit analysis does not always argue for less regulation. It weeds out regulations that do not pay their way, but it can also identify measures not on the statute books, that should be. For example, defibrillators installed in workplaces might be a cost-effective way to save victims of heart attacks. The White House's Office of Management and Budget has sent about a dozen letters to the agencies it oversees prompting them to investigate such potentially beneficial regulations.

Fundamentally, it is not “anti-government” to weigh the costs of public action. On the contrary, the “regulatory excess” Mr Verheugen sees in the EU has doubtless damaged the prestige of Brussels. Some regulatory circumspection, nudged by cost-benefit sheepdogs, might even rehabilitate it. If the EU had not mandated the weights of chicory packets, perhaps people would not so readily believe that it regulates the curvature of cucumbers.

*“In Defence of the Economic Analysis of Regulation”. American Enterprise Institute

†“Cost-Benefit Analysis”. Available at www.progressiveregulation.org

Free degrees to fly - Economist 24 February

2005-03-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

>Already a big global business, is higher education poised for take-off?
>
THERE used to be three near-certainties about higher education. It was supplied on a national basis, mostly to local students. It was government-regulated. And competition and profit were almost unknown concepts. As most education was publicly funded, the state had a big say in what was taught, to how many and for how long. Insofar as it existed at all, competition was a gentlemanly business; few educators thought much about customers, fewer about profit.

How that has changed. Higher education is now international in a way it has not been since the heyday of Europe's great medieval universities—and on a vastly greater scale. Numbers studying abroad were statistically negligible only two decades ago, says Andreas Schleicher, of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based think-tank. Now growth is soaring: 2m university students—approaching 2% of the world's total of 100m, according to the International Finance Corporation—were studying outside their home country in 2003. Since the late 1990s the higher-education market has been growing by 7% a year. Annual fee income alone is now an estimated $30 billion. Private, profit-seeking institutions are still a minority, but almost all universities are beginning to compete for talent and money. That is breeding independence of government, both financially and psychologically; inexorably, the state's role is shrinking.

The two big trends, of internationalisation and competition, feed each other. The more that universities tailor their offers to foreign students, the more attractive they become. And the more that students hop between countries, the more their choices count rather than the wishes of a particular government. German politicians may be willing to tolerate overcrowded universities for political reasons, but they cannot stop German students unhappy with this policy from going to Britain, where undergraduate teaching is much better. Britain's government may be willing to constrain the best universities by capping fees and fiddling with admissions rules to help poorer students gain places—but it cannot stop more of the richest and brightest students turning to America instead. American politicians, worried about terrorism, tightened visa rules—but their universities lost out as the best brains went elsewhere. Just as globalisation has let capital and labour search the world for the best deal, the same is happening with students, academics and donations.

The idea of the student as consumer is a new and subversive concept in much of the world. In Europe and many developing countries, the customer in education for most of the past century has been the government: it wanted the nation's brains educated in the most useful disciplines and in a cost-effective way. Universities may have seen themselves as temples of learning, but the taxpayer was often paying for incense as well as priests and disciples. In short, the system resembled a Soviet-style planned economy. Now that system is facing a transition to what, in effect, is a market. The change will be messy and painful.

Most students, like customers everywhere, are looking for the best deal: how much time and money gains them what benefit? That does not necessarily mean they will favour dull, utilitarian courses. After all, food shoppers seek taste as well as nutrition. A university that teaches mind-stretching subjects of no direct relevance to earning power can still flourish. But to attract the best students it will still have to market its strong points—its excellent teaching and awesomely beautiful buildings, for example.

In much of Europe, though, money does not yet play a role in students' calculations. Where fees are fixed or non-existent, the only real choices are about where and what to study. And even that may not vary much: most undergraduate tuition, in particular in most continental European countries, is similarly skimpy.

So the choosiest students—meaning the brightest, most ambitious and richest—often go abroad. Some 112,000 students from elsewhere in the European Union study in Britain already. But the fastest growth in students is coming from China. Around 38,000 study in Britain now—the result of 50% annual growth since the late 1990s. The British Council, a state-funded marketer of British culture, reckons the number could double by 2010. Chinese students come to Britain because their own country's fast-expanding system of higher education still lacks the quantity and quality they seek. The OECD estimates that the number of Chinese university students will be 16m this year, up from 11m in 2000.

In the recent past, more went to America—roughly 60,000 annually—attracted by academic excellence and generous scholarships. But applications for 2004-05 plunged—by 45% in the case of graduate students from China, and 30% for those from India. That was chiefly because of tougher visa rules, which the American government is now, belatedly, partially relaxing. But growing competition was also a factor. The number of students from China in Australia, for example, rose by 47% in 2003, and those from India by 52%, although overall Australia's overseas-student numbers dropped by a tenth. France's Grandes Ecoles (specialist independent postgraduate outfits) such as ESSEC, a business school, are competing for the same market, with targeted courses taught in English. So is the Netherlands.

Brains without borders
Foreign students are usually charged higher fees, but they are not just cash-cows. Universities like their motivation, and the cosmopolitan flavour they bring to campuses. The better your students, the better your reputation, and hence your chances of attracting more good students. Even Oxford, Britain's oldest university, is planning to market itself aggressively overseas. In the past, says John Hood, its new vice-chancellor, “we waited for foreign students to approach us.”

But what the customers want may not be what the universities are used to providing. British universities are scrambling to adapt everything from teaching practices to student social life to meet the needs of students from different cultures and backgrounds. Arrangements that suit some, such as lively classroom discussions, can jar for others from a more deferential academic culture, for example.

Some changes go much deeper. Increasingly, British and Australian universities are opening campuses abroad in places such as China, Malaysia and Dubai, to teach, they hope, more foreign students, more cheaply. The University of Texas is increasing its ties to London's University College, buying a large building on the campus, and swapping students, staff and know-how. Texans like the fun of London; Londoners like lavish Texan budgets.

There are doubts about the profitability of some of these ventures—in particular, some British universities have found themselves landed with expensive commitments from over-enthusiastic investments. But however such cross-border education is delivered, the important trend is that the traditional bundle of services provided by a university is unravelling.

In the past, the same people taught and examined their students. For the most part, if you wanted a Cambridge degree you studied at Cambridge. But from a business point of view, that represents a wasted opportunity. A university can examine far more students than it actually teaches, and with a strong brand it can trade on its reputation for quality by licensing other people to teach its courses. Chicago's Kellogg business school, for example, teaches around half of its students through local partners in places such as Israel and Hong Kong. It controls the curriculum, inspects standards and issues qualifications. But the actual teaching is outsourced and offshored.

The purest example of this comes from the world of professional vocational training—where governments' influence is at its weakest, and consumer demand is most focused. The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification is roughly equivalent to a specialised postgraduate finance degree, including a mixture of economics, ethics, law and accountancy. It is much liked by employers in financial services. Whereas there are tens of thousands of finance degrees available around the world, ranging from the excellent to the worthless, there is only one CFA, managed and examined by an American association of financial professionals, the CFA Institute. It used to be just an American qualification. But explosive growth (see chart) has made it, in effect, a global currency.

To take the CFA, candidates need only to register, pay fees of $1,455 and turn up to the one of 274 test centres around the world. Most of them study with private providers, who use the freely accessible curriculum and reading list. But some 40 universities are now teaching it as part of their postgraduate courses.

So, just like their counterparts in manufacturing industry 20 years ago, rich-world universities are concentrating on businesses that make money, dumping lines that do not and shifting production to cheaper markets abroad. Last month Oxford unveiled plans to cut the number of loss-making undergraduate places for home students (where the government sets the price), and increase the number of graduate and foreign students (where the fees are deregulated). Other British universities will follow soon.

In bed with business
Such universities are not only operating more like businesses. They are also operating more closely with them. Kaplan, a big education company owned by the same firm that owns the Washington Post newspaper, has done a deal with Nottingham Trent University in Britain to run a foundation college for overseas students. BPP, a firm that is Kaplan's big rival in Britain, has done deals with British universities so that people taking its professional exams can gain academic postgraduate degrees at the same time.

There are two big dangers here. One concerns quality. At the bottom end of the education market, qualifications reflect only payment—at worst, through bribes. Corruption in Russia has degraded the value of degrees from its once-famous universities. Foreign universities that have set up there are sometimes little better.

That is not a new problem. But globalisation and competition make it much harder to control. Who is to say that a minor British university's outpost in, say, Dubai, offers degrees that are as good as the home institution's? For some degrees, such as MBAs, there are credible international rankings. But sorting out the relative rigour of every course from every university is impossible. Such confusion creates temptation, particularly when it is combined with the need to keep customers happy. A university that gives failing grades to a large number of fee-paying students puts its future revenues at risk.

In theory, universities have a long-term interest in protecting their brand. But quality control is one of the great unsolved problems in education, even at Harvard, which, thanks to its reputation and a $20-billion endowment, could hardly be better buffered from the pressures of the market. Certainly government regulation does not seem to have helped much: British universities are subject to a detailed and intrusive form of inspection from a body called the Quality Assurance Agency, lovingly known as the KGB of higher education. But it is hard to find anyone who says that the steady rise in first-class degrees reflects only increased student brilliance.

This is a further reason for separating teaching and examining. There have been no allegations of dumbing-down and grade inflation with the CFA, where the pass rate has dropped from over 70% in the 1970s to only 40% now. Jeff Diermeier, the head of the CFA Institute, says that business schools struggle to match the time that his institute can devote to keeping the curriculum up to date and rigorous. The higher-education marketplace of the future may need more such central bank-like outfits as guardians of standards.

State of play
The second big problem is government interference. In many countries, the idea that the state should control higher education is barely challenged. In much of continental Europe, even charging tuition fees or allowing universities to compete are seen as dangerously radical notions. After years of agonising, Germany agreed only last month to let its universities charge fees.

Government intransigence can be a big obstacle to any change in higher education. The most extreme example is Belarus, which has simply closed independent universities that had set up there and refused to issue exit visas to students wanting to enrol abroad. The Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenka, says that such study “poisons the mind”. In South Africa, the government has thrown up so many obstacles that Bond University, a big Australian investor, has pulled out altogether.

Education is on the agenda of the next round of international trade talks, but changes are unlikely. As with other forms of protectionism, national governments claim that they are acting in the interests of consumers. Yet the more the market grows, the less tenable that position becomes.

Despite all this, the private and independent higher-education sector is growing fast. Even in America, where for-profit outfits have been plagued by scandal, expansion is continuing. The University of Phoenix, America's largest private university, which specialises in the high-pressure marketing of online and part-time degrees, is expanding overseas. It already operates a small campus in China and plans to open in Mexico. Kaplan has bought Dublin Business School, which also has a campus in Dubai and is planning new ventures in Europe. The University of Chicago business school is opening a campus in London—the first big American university to do so. BPP is applying to the Privy Council, a medieval relic that regulates such things in Britain, to award degrees.

BPP's success in attracting 50,000 part-time and 3,000 full-time students has already made quite a dent in the public-sector universities' customer base, although the company is regarded with disdain by many of its competitors. One London vice-chancellor, whose university's postgraduate courses are seen by BPP as a prime poaching target because of their low quality and high price, affects not even to have heard of BPP's existence. With degree-awarding powers, that should change. BPP is also expanding fast abroad.

Although governments' attitudes vary (see table), only a totalitarian state could maintain complete control of higher education. The fastest change will be at the margins, driven by students seeking alternative offerings. Wrong-headed governments risk not only losing international market share, but also their country's best students.

So the direction is clear: competition can raise standards for home and foreign students alike, and the speed with which it emerges depends to a large extent on universities' freedom from government. How fast that comes will depend on university management, which is often strikingly slow and bureaucratic. The wet breath of government on administrators' necks is partly what makes decision-making soggy—but state control is not the only culprit. Even rich, independent American universities can be badly run.

If governments want to change that, allowing failure to bring its natural consequences would be an excellent place to start. Currently, weak universities do not fail in the way that their poor performance warrants. An ailing state-financed university may be shrunk, or have its management changed, but it will not go bust or be bought in the way that, say, a for-profit outfit would. It is difficult for a successful university to take over an ailing one, or for two complementary campuses to merge.

The challenge of change
Running universities in a way that suits a competitive environment may mean some uncomfortable changes. But it does not mean necessarily adopting a corporate model, with a board of directors and a chief executive. A non-profit university exists, ultimately, so that its members can teach, think and learn. Making them into “staff”—mere shopfloor workers on an academic production line—risks losing the ethos which has given universities their character and value.

There is no single answer to this. But the pressures of the market are creating an increasingly segmented system. The clearest opportunity for profit is in teaching, either in co-operation with existing universities or in competition with them. That will be strongest where student choice is strongest—ie, courses whose prices are deregulated, for which there is no state-subsidised alternative and whose connection to future earning power is strongest. Business schools and professional training are already examples.

The danger for old-style universities, particularly in Britain and continental Europe, is that government subsidy and control continues at a debilitating level, but is not quite bad enough to be intolerable. That will not just harm universities in the state system. It will also distort the market. Competition and internationalisation in education have already benefited a wealthy, brainy minority. Plenty more students should gain similarly in future, if only universities are free to fly.

Special report on suicide terrorism (Economist)

2004-11-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

Martyrdom and murder

Jan 8th 2004
From The Economist print edition

AP

Terrorists have embraced suicide attacks mainly for their advantages in this world, rather than their rewards in the next

“I HAVE always dreamed”, says an anarchist in Joseph Conrad's novel “The Secret Agent”, “of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples...No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity.” But, Conrad's anarchist complains, “I could never get as many as three such men together.” These days, there seems to be a superabundance of people willing to die in order to commit murder: in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Russia, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Is this phenomenon new? If so, what explains it? And what can be done about it?

Suicide terrorism, like the slippery concept of terrorism in general, is harder to define than it may appear. For instance, are the suicide bombings in Israel really so different from previous incidents in which Palestinian gunmen and knifemen (and the occasional Israeli) launched assaults that they had little hope of surviving? They were scarcely the first to sacrifice their own lives in order to take others. In the first century AD, the Zealots and Sicarii, two Jewish sects, attacked the Roman occupiers of Judaea and their allies in public places. The Assassins, a cult active in modern Iran and Syria from the 11th to the 13th centuries, killed their targets (mainly Muslim rulers whom they considered apostates) at close range and with no escape routes. Their name comes from the Arabic hashishiyya; the drug's powers were thought to explain the Assassins' oblivious bravery.

From the mid-18th century, other groups launched suicidal attacks against colonial rulers in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Then there are the countless individuals who have died for a cause without taking others with them: think of Irish and Kurdish hunger-strikers, or of the human minesweepers despatched by Iran during its war with Iraq.

Yet for all these partial precedents, there is something novel about the type of terrorism in which the terrorist's death is a necessary and essential part of his act, not just an incidental cost. This type arrived in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Before then, modern groups such as the IRA and ETA, the Basque separatist movement, planned to escape after (or before) their bombings, mortar attacks and so on. Hizbullah's campaign of suicidal car and truck explosions—one of which killed 241 Americans in Beirut in October 1983; 58 people died in a strike on a French barracks on the same day—changed the face of terror.

The fact that Hizbullah started the trend, and that its spread has coincided with the rise of other Islamic groups—Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), al-Qaeda and others—has led some to surmise that Islamic fundamentalism somehow explains it. Proponents of this theory can cite the lengths to which some terrorists go to justify their attacks in Islamic terms, manipulating the precedents set by the Prophet and his companions and finessing the meanings of three key concepts: suicide, martyrdom and jihad.

Unholy warriors
The Koran is unequivocal about suicide: as a mark of despair in Allah, it earns eternal damnation. On the other hand, martyrdom—death in jihad, incurred in Allah's name—earns eternal bliss: “Think not of those who are slain in Allah's way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of the Lord.” The Koranic outline of the martyr's rewards in paradise is elaborated in the hadith (prophetic sayings and anecdotes) and has been embellished by generations of scholars. Islamic suicide bombers go to their deaths variously expecting to meet the Prophet and to see the face of Allah. Their sins will be forgiven, and they can intercede for their relatives on the day of resurrection. They will live amid rivers of wine and honey, and be married to 72 black-eyed virgins.

But should their bombings count as sinful suicide or glorious martyrdom? That partly depends on how the volatile concept of jihad is defined. For many Muslims, jihad is principally an internal struggle. But, especially since the advent of Wahhabism, a branch of Sunni Islam that evolved in the 18th century, the notion of jihad as external warfare has been revived. Despite Koranic injunctions to the contrary, some radical Islamic thinkers have justified the killing of civilians, and of other Muslims, in the name of jihad.

Likewise, suicide bombings—or “martyrdom operations”, as some of their exponents prefer—have been rationalised as a praiseworthy embrace of death at the hands of the enemy, and as a legitimate tactic in extremis. Among other sophistic arguments, some terrorists say that Allah, and not the bomber, decides whether the latter will die, and whether women and children will perish with the shaheed (martyr). Some scholars believe that a newly strident view of martyrdom, adopted by many Shia Muslims after the Iranian revolution of 1979, informed the new species of terrorism that Hizbullah, a Shia group, developed not long afterwards.

A firm belief in paradise is clearly an asset for anyone strapping on a bomb. But all these theological somersaults suggest that religion may be as much a hurdle, which the perpetrators of “martyrdom operations” need to overcome, as a motive for their violence. Hizbullah's clerics, for example, have always been squeamish about suicidal missions. And, quite apart from these qualms, there is another compelling reason to doubt that Islamic fundamentalism accounts for the rise of suicide bombing: non-Muslims are among its most devoted practitioners.

Human cruise missiles
The single most prolifically suicidal terrorist group is the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers. In the course of their attritional struggle for an independent Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka, the LTTE has, among scores of other attacks, bombed the World Trade Centre in Colombo in 1997 and assassinated two heads of state. LTTE suicide missions, which began in 1987, are inspired more by cultish devotion to Velupillai Prabhakaran, the group's leader, than by religion. The Kurdish PKK, which has deployed suicide bombers in its quests for Kurdish autonomy and for the release of its captured leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is influenced less by Islam than by Marxist-Leninism. So too is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which perpetrated the first suicide strike in Israel for more than two months on Christmas Day.

Another sort of explanation for suicide terrorism focuses on its practitioners' travails and poverty in this world, rather than their imagined delights in the next. It used to be the case that a Palestinian bomber conformed to a recognisable type: he was young, male, single, religious and unemployed. He often had a personal grudge against Israel—for instance, a relative who had been arrested or injured by the Israeli army. He may have hoped to secure earthly as well as heavenly rewards for his relatives, in the form of financial donations after his death, and the new house that his parents might be given after the Israelis demolished their old one as punishment for his crime.

Reuters

The aftermath in Riyadh

But the affluence of many of the September 11th hijackers cast doubt on the notion that poverty was a necessary, let alone sufficient, condition for suicidal terrorism. And since the start of the second intifada in 2000, the profile of Palestinian bombers has changed: several have been well educated and less devout than those of the mid-1990s. The LTTE, and especially the PKK and Chechen terrorists, have preferred female bombers, because they attract, or used to attract, less suspicion. Some Palestinian groups (though not al-Qaeda) have also used women, conjuring up fresh religious sophistries to justify female martyrdom. Globally, says Yoram Schweitzer, an expert in suicide terrorism at the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, the bomber has no clear profile.

A better way to understand the popularity of suicide attacks may be to focus on their advantages for the groups who commission them. Such operations are rarely, if ever, the work of lone lunatics. Hamas, PIJ and the other Palestinian groups who practise suicide terrorism recruit, indoctrinate and train their bombers. They write the texts for the video testaments filmed shortly before each self-immolation (making them unreliable records of the true motives of the “martyr”), which the bombers themselves watch to redouble their resolve. They take the photographs that will later appear on propaganda posters. Then they deliver their foot-soldiers to pre-identified targets. Al-Qaeda is remarkable for the expertise and independence of its agents, but they too are trained and primed for their missions.

Suicide bombing is a corporate effort: in this respect, the closest historical analogy may be the kamikaze pilots who trained as a cadre to terrorise the American fleet in the Pacific in 1944-45. And suicide appeals to these groups principally because it is a good way to kill large numbers of people. Robert Pape, of the University of Chicago, calculates that between 1980 and 2001 13 people died on average in every suicide attack, whereas just one was killed in other terrorist incidents—excluding September 11th, which would make the death ratio much starker. For those whose aim is maximum destruction, not just maximum publicity, it is the natural choice.

This special deadliness is partly the result of the suicide bomber's ability to adapt the place and time of his detonation to the last minute. As Bruce Hoffman of Rand, a think-tank, puts it, the suicide bomber is “the ultimate smart bomb, or human cruise missile”. If the bomber is spotted, he can detonate instantly. Fathi Shiqaqi, a founder of PIJ, used these unique advantages to justify “martyrdom operations”. The Palestinian groups regard suicide attacks as a way to counteract Israel's conventional military superiority.

Depending on death
Suicide is also a flexible technology. Where Hizbullah used cars and trucks to attack well defended installations, Hamas, PIJ and some Chechen bombers mingle among civilians, their concealed belts or vests loaded with explosives and shrapnel. The LTTE, which turned to suicide because other methods were having frustratingly little impact, has despatched suicide bombers in boats, and to conduct assassinations: much easier if the assassin has no intention of escaping. Whoever sent the two suicide bombers who narrowly failed to kill General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, also on Christmas Day, understood that advantage.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, terrorists also regard suicide attacks as low-risk, given the scale of devastation they can inflict. As Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, has put it, “the method of martyrdom operations [is] the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and least costly to the mujahideen in terms of casualties.” No accomplices are needed for rescues or getaways. Nor is there much danger of bombers betraying their comrades: if LTTE emissaries survive the explosion, they bite a poison capsule.

As well as these tactical benefits, suicide terrorism offers a strategic one. After the debacle in Somalia in 1993, Mr bin Laden concluded that sensitivity to casualties was the heel of the American Achilles; Palestinian terrorists think something similar about Israel. Suicide bombings juxtapose these groups' disdain for life with their victims' supposed love of it. This helps to create the impression of an undeterrable enemy, one freed by his self-disregard to strike anywhere: “I depend on death,” says a would-be suicide bomber in “The Secret Agent”, “which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked.”

Simultaneous bombings magnify this sense of vulnerability; so do sequences of attacks. As Mr Pape observes, almost all suicide missions occur as part of campaigns, often, as with the regular attacks on the Americans and their allies in Iraq, designed to liberate territory occupied by democracies. (Democratic governments, it is presumed, are more likely to be swayed by their citizens' deaths than others.) The cumulative effect of such campaigns was aptly described by Josephus, a classical historian who chronicled the anti-Roman insurgency in Judaea: “The panic created was more alarming than the calamity itself; everyone, as on the battlefield, hourly expected death. Men kept watch at a distance on their enemies and would not trust even their friends...” Everyday activities become perilous; ordinary life begins to seem untenable.

AP

Targetting commuters near Chechnya

Terrorists have some reasons to believe that such onslaughts work. Chief among those is the withdrawal of French and American forces from Lebanon after Hizbullah's atrocities. “We couldn't stay there and run the risk of another suicide attack on the marines,” wrote Ronald Reagan, then America's president, in his memoirs. Other apparent concessions to suicide campaigns, such as temporary Israeli withdrawals from Palestinian territory in the mid-1990s, have been more ambiguous; but terrorists tend to interpret history in a way that burnishes their own efforts. For their part, the kamikaze pilots helped to convince America that Japan would fight to the last soldier. This conviction was partly why atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, like other forms of terrorism, suicide attacks are designed to impress the terrorist's own constituency, as well as to coerce their opponents—and “martyrs” have a particular propaganda value. Some groups have embraced suicide to keep pace with rival outfits, with whom they are competing for recruits and support. This was the case in Lebanon, where other organisations, including some secular ones, imitated Hizbullah's new technique. Likewise, various offshoots of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which once preferred ambushes and guerrilla attacks, took up “martyrdom operations” after the suicidal “successes” of PIJ and Hamas.

Will the bomber always get through?
The prevalence of suicide in contemporary terrorism has helped to persuade some observers that outrages from Rabat to Riyadh to Grozny are all the handiwork of al-Qaeda—just as, in the 1980s, conspiracy theorists believed that terrorism across the globe was being orchestrated by the Soviet Union. This sort of talk suits Mr bin Laden; and the idea of a single, coherent enemy also has some appeal for westerners. In reality, suicide has spread not because of central co-ordination, but because it works. The term “suicide bombing”, with its connotations of unhinged despondency, obscures the essential rationality of the method. Some in Israel and America, arguing that it also obscures the victims, prefer “homicide bombings”.

How can the targets of such attacks protect themselves? By picking on democracies, the terrorists can be reasonably sure that their adversaries will stop short of “the Mongol method” (ie, wholesale slaughter of the population from which the bombers derive). Even so, suicide campaigns are often designed to madden their victims into inflicting collective punishment, thus further radicalising the terrorists' actual or potential supporters, who might otherwise be repulsed by the carnage that such extreme violence causes.

But there are subtler methods. Because they are corporate enterprises, disrupting or preventing attacks is not just a question of catching the bomber: there are also recruiters, trainers, reconnaissance agents, bomb-makers and safe houses. Israel prevents many attacks by penetrating these networks—though as Shlomo Gazit, a former head of military intelligence, points out, Israel knows roughly where its enemies can be found, and so can monitor their movements and cultivate informers. Police in, say, London or New York do not enjoy that luxury.

Israel's checkpoints and cordons (also unlikely to be emulated elsewhere) intercept some killers; they also reassure the public that something is being done, thus countering the terrorists psychologically as well as militarily. Even when the bomber gets through, vigilant security guards who manage to keep pedestrian attackers out of restaurants or discotheques can massively reduce the number of casualties. Other sensible defensive measures include the rapid dispersal of crowds at the scene of an explosion, to protect them from follow-up strikes.

Such vigilance can make life grindingly tense. If possible, the best answer must be to choke the supply of the terrorists' prize asset—the bombers—through political compromise. Yet against the ultra-extremists of al-Qaeda, intelligence, disruption and vigilance may be the only ways.