2021-11-06-Economist Graphs
The world this week
Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
The world this week
Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
Leaders
American politics
One year on
The president needs to distance himself from his party’s left fringe
Markets and inflation
Bond traders stir
The message from unruly fixed-income markets
Government in Britain
Are rules for losers?
He seems to think rules are for losers
Climate change and investing
The uses and abuses of green finance
Why the net-zero pledges of financial firms won’t save the world
Abiy’s abyss
Act now to avert carnage in Ethiopia
As rebels march on the capital, ethnic persecution accelerates
Letters
Letters to the editor
On Dave Chappelle, Spain, lorry drivers, carbon taxes, trees, our NFT auction
A selection of correspondence
Briefing
Social mobility in America
Stuck in place
Social mobility has dropped precipitously
Europe
Italy
The Mario magic
But there is a lot left to do, and not much time to do it in
Portugal
The contraption crashes
Prime Minister António Costa struggled to govern with the hard left
Global warming and food
Hot cuisine
Say hello to pan-fried rabbitfish
Georgia
Heavy vetting
It is not easy to spot
Germany’s Turks
From guest worker to citizen?
More are integrated, but two-thirds of adults are not German citizens
Charlemagne
Noisy neighbours
Post-Brexit rows with the EU are inevitable. They are not always serious
Britain
Political lobbying
Tory sleaze, again
Owen Paterson broke lobbying rules. To save him, it wanted to rewrite those rules
Judicial independence
Government v judges
Tory claims that judges intrude too much into politics are wrong and dangerous
Climate summitry
COP26 flows over
Success or failure depends on more than the host, and will be clear only in hindsight
Smoking
Vape nation
How the country became an international outlier
Monetary policy
Raising the roof
But changes in the British housing market mute their effect
Bagehot
Blue Leviathan
The government is increasingly activist, from raising taxes to stoking culture wars
Middle East & Africa
Ethiopia’s civil war
A battle for the capital looms
Tigray’s rebels are on a roll
South Africa
Hegemon no more
Local elections suggest the ANC will need coalitions to stay in charge
Protecting the Congo basin
Money for old trees
Trees in the Congo basin provide a service the world should pay for
Algeria, Morocco and Western Sahara
The disputed desert
A desert dispute is aggravating the old rivalry between Algeria and Morocco
United States
American competitiveness
The maths wars
How teaching multiplication tables became another victim of the political divide
Off-year elections
Physics for politics
They lost power in Virginia and barely hung on in New Jersey, both Democrat-friendly states
The Supreme Court
Lawyers, guns and babies
The latter ruling may hinge on a 14th century British statute
Guns and religion
No sympathy for the devil
The world seems a more threatening place to those who fear demons and hell
Medicine and identity
Portrait of a detransitioner
Carol has been a woman, a man and is a woman again. Her story has lessons for trans medicine
Lexington
Glenn Youngkin and Ivy League populism
Virginia’s governor-elect is the latest Republican culture warrior with an expensive education
The Americas
Brazil
From hero to villain
The government’s green rhetoric in Glasgow clashes with inaction at home
Latin American TV
1001 episodes
Many viewers prefer epic love tales to gory local narco-dramas
Bello
Spooked by Venezuela
By wrecking a country, a leftist regime inadvertently boosts support for the illiberal right
Asia
Pollution
Baby, it’s toxic outside
Even as the country pledges climate action, its people are dying from breathing
Instagram and youth culture
Hot shots
To show off the time (and money) they have spent with personal trainers
Bangladesh and India
Spilling over
The prime minister blames India’s Muslim-bashing for Hindu-bashing in her own country
Japanese politics
Wishy-washy
Kishida Fumio handily led his party to re-election, but his agenda remains vague
Banyan
Mine for the taking
Both countries are wrangling with miners on how to share benefits and costs
China
The Communist Party
Control the present, control the past
Who controls the present controls the past
Military strategy
An unpacific contest
The Pentagon warns that China is fast building up its nukes, as well as its conventional forces, to confront America
International
Forests and climate change
Up a tree
Without that, more trees may not mean less climate change
Business
Pricing power
Passing the buck
At the moment there is a glut
American basketball and China
The audacity of hoops
Human-rights protests threaten profits
Newspapers
Paperchase
It may accelerate the move online
Amazon in Germany
Strike season
But most Amazon workers are reluctant to join a strike
The new face of old tech
Reinvention as a service
But taking on the big tech firms will be hard
Bartleby
Why executives like the office
Blame a mixture of conditioning, carpets and concrete concerns
Schumpeter
The Gorgon knot
State-owned giants are squeezing them out of megaprojects
Finance & economics
America’s economy
Inner strength
High inflation, supply snarls—and strong growth momentum
Interest rates
Bond markets v central banks
Investors bet that policymakers will have to break their promises
Emerging markets
Living the high life
What Brazil, Argentina and Turkey say about the importance of fiscal and monetary policy
Payments in Africa
Turf wars
As investment pours in, they are expanding across the continent and into new services
Buttonwood
Schrödinger’s markets
Lessons for finance from 20th-century physics
Free exchange
The greedy-jobs gap
Mothers’ careers suffer when parents maximise their combined income, says a new book
Science & technology
Greenhouse gases
Set in green concrete
It is a big source of emissions, but might one day be the reverse
Green aviation
Liquid sunshine
How to combine atmospheric CO2 and water to power aeroplanes
Unimals
Balls, sticks and the Baldwin effect
It harks back to a 19th-century idea about evolution
Animal migration
Eel meet again
They can tell its strength as well as its direction
Funerary rituals
Blood not so simple
Whether the donor was willing will forever remain unknown
Books & arts
Nationalism and revolution
The day after the dream
It inspired a wave of nationalism—and holds lessons for foreign intervention today
Women and philosophy
The moral of the story
A new book traces their pathbreaking friendships and careers
Nigerian fiction
Body blows
The Nobel laureate’s new novel offers a bleak diagnosis of his country
Books and social media
Word of mouth
Old-fashioned critics might not approve. But why should BookTok’s stars care?
Edvard Munch
Light in the darkness
MUNCH is one of the biggest museums anywhere devoted to a single artist
Economic & financial indicators
Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail
Inflation
The used-car conundrum
Our new measure shows that this portends lower inflation—but not enough for the Fed to lower its guard
Obituary
Bernard Haitink
Music, not words
The great conductor died on October 21st, aged 92
