Новости за 09.07.2020

WHEN THE nation shut down in March, something both remarkable and utterly obvious happened to everyday crime: it plummeted. Graham Farrell, a criminologist at the University of Leeds who looked at data from the Lancashire Constabulary, found that within a week of lockdown recorded crime in Lancashire declined by 41%. Shoplifting was especially hard hit, falling by 62%. It is a difficult crime to commit when most shops are closed.

FIRST CAME the panic-buying and the stockpiling. As soon as it became clear that covid-19 was spreading through Britain, shoppers hit the grocery stores. Everything with a long shelf life was swept into trolleys—pasta, tinned beans, bottled water. People even cleared the shelves of pickled onions, recalls Peter Batt, who oversees the Co-Op’s convenience stores in southern England. “They were thinking a wartime sort of scenario,” he says.

IN LIFE, SERGEI MAGNITSKY was a thorn in the side of Russia’s kleptocrats. The Russian lawyer paid the heaviest price for uncovering institutionalised tax fraud: he was tortured and died in prison. In death, he haunts them still. America already has a “Magnitsky Act”, aimed at people responsible for gross human-rights violations. On July 6th, the Foreign Office announced its own “Magnitsky” sanctions against 47 individuals and two entities. They went into effect on the same day.

IN NOVEMBER 2010, addressing students at Peking University, David Cameron was asked what advice he would give the Communist Party in an age of growing pluralism. “An amazing noise went around the room, half admiration and half shock,” he later recalled. “As I looked around the sea of faces I thought: is this system really going to last? My conclusion was that, in its current form, it couldn’t.”

FOR MORE than a decade, Britain’s productivity growth has lagged behind the rest of the world’s. This “productivity problem” has baffled economists and troubled politicians. Now the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has offered at least a partial solution. On July 6th, it published an update on the measurement of prices in the telecommunications industry, which suggests an underestimate of sectoral output so large that it had a sizeable impact on its sums for the economy as a whole.

IN THE POPULAR imagination, Americans toil endlessly in the office while their European counterparts arrive late, lunch at leisure and depart punctually. If that were ever true equity traders were never let in on the scheme. Opening hours on stockmarkets in Europe are some of the longest in the world, keeping financiers at their Bloomberg terminals far longer than those following American or Asian bourses. Despite that, a proposal to cut back trading hours is making little headway.

IT WAS A company revered by business-school gurus and investors alike. British consumers cherished it for its value-for-money clothing. Its own-brand biscuits were unrivalled. But the glory days of Marks & Spencer are long gone. As if to underscore this, it recently became a “fallen angel”: its bonds were demoted to speculative-grade (or “junk”) status by S&P, a rating agency. Many other once-admired companies have been similarly humbled. Ford, Renault and Kraft Heinz are among the bigger angels to have fallen in recent months. Читать дальше...

AND THEY’RE off! On July 8th the window for members to nominate the next director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) closed. Over the next few months members will try to pick between eight candidates, each hoping to rescue the institution from its present sorry state. The process will highlight some of the WTO’s best features—but will also show why the organisation is in such a mess.

CHINA’S BUSTLING digital economy has spawned thousands of startups. Yet in the eyes of many it remains “BAT or bust”, to cite a saying among jobseekers from the country’s elite universities. The BAT in question refers to the original trio of Chinese internet stars: Baidu, a search engine; Alibaba, an online emporium; and Tencent, a mobile-payments and video-game titan. The acronym is overdue an update.

SCHUMPETER IS ONLY an amateur stargazer. His equipment is no fancier than a pair of eyes and a place in the countryside, away from London’s light pollution. That is enough to make out Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—and, occasionally, the International Space Station crossing the firmament. In the past few years a new spectacle has appeared, in the form of the Starlink satellites. Launched in batches by SpaceX, an American rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, the tech billionaire behind Tesla’s electric cars... Читать дальше...

TIMES SEEM tough for China’s chipmaking champion, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Over the past year America has attacked its supply chains, cutting it off from essential high-tech tools. It has slapped export controls on SMIC’s customers and enacted new rules which threaten to designate the firm as subservient to the People’s Liberation Army. The company’s sales slumped by 7% in 2019 to $3.1bn—not the kind of performance expected of a Chinese high-tech titan.

“TOO OFTEN, executive compensation in the US is ridiculously out of line with performance…The deck is stacked against investors.” It was with these words that in 2006 Warren Buffett, a legendary investor and red-blooded capitalist, challenged the received wisdom in corporate America about CEO pay. This maintains that bosses deserve generous rewards because these are tightly linked to their companies’ financial performance. Fourteen years’ worth of evidence later the received wisdom is still looking shaky. Читать дальше...

AS LAWS GO, the dictum devised by C. Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian, was admirably succinct: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” His essay, first published in The Economist in 1955, has stood the test of time, in the sense that people still refer to “Parkinson’s law”. But the experience of working life during the pandemic means that Bartleby would now like to suggest three corollaries to the theorem.

HONG KONGERS had long worried that the Communist Party would transform the territory by stealth into just another Chinese city. In the past few days, armed with a new national-security law which it imposed on Hong Kong on June 30th, it has been doing so brazenly. From the appointment of a party commissar to work with the chief executive, to the pulling of politically sensitive books from library shelves, Hong Kong is changing fast. The stockmarket has leapt, but many hearts have sunk.

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

Twilight of Democracy. By Anne Applebaum. Doubleday; 224 pages; $25. Penguin; £16.99. 

Darke Matter. By Rick Gekoski. Constable; 336 pages; £16.99

THE HERO of Rick Gekoski’s debut novel at first seemed to be a misanthropic crank. James Darke, a retired English teacher, spent months at home wallowing in gloomy thoughts, replaying wistful memories and berating the cruel and idiotic ways of the world and his fellow man. When it emerged that Darke was broken by the loss of his wife, the story and its protagonist acquired heft. A coming-of-old-age tale unfolded into a poignant yet hard-hitting meditation on grief... Читать дальше...

Stranger in the Shogun’s City. By Amy Stanley.Scribner; 352 pages; $28. Chatto & Windus; £16.99

THIS COLUMN comes with an unusual warning—the type that is sometimes called a trigger warning. It will mention a word that was once in common usage in parts of the United States, but which many people have come to regard as the foulest in the English language.

IN THE EARLY hours of July 2nd a building caught fire in the grounds of the nuclear plant at Natanz in central Iran. Officials downplayed it as an accident in an unfinished shed. But photos showed a building with machinery on the roof. Satellite images added more doubt: scattered debris looked consistent with an explosion, not a fire. The cover story was short-lived. A spokesman for Iran’s nuclear agency soon admitted it was a factory for centrifuges used to enrich uranium. The damage, he said, could slow work on advanced models. Читать дальше...

FOR TWO nights the sharp report of gunfire crackled through the pitter-patter of summer rain. Across the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, cars and petrol stations were burnt, shops and businesses looted. At least ten people were killed in clashes between rioters and the police in the city. Similar confrontations took place in towns throughout Oromia, the largest of Ethiopia’s nine ethnically based regions and one that has been the site of repeated bouts of violence in recent years. In the country as a whole at least 166 people were killed... Читать дальше...

“TEACHERS ARE starving,” says Tsitsi, who works at a school in a township in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. Like nurses, soldiers and bureaucrats, teachers have seen their real incomes evaporate as annualised inflation approaches 1,000%. Their monthly pay, which they receive in Zimbabwe dollars, is worth about $30.

“YOU MAY think you’re safe,” says a 57-year-old resident of Doropo in northern Ivory Coast. “But jihadists are like ants, they can come in without being noticed.” On June 11th, just three weeks after Ivory Coast’s army reassuringly declared that its northern frontier with war-torn Burkina Faso was “under control”, a band of armed insurgents proved it wrong. Some 20 men on motorbikes descended on an army-and-police outpost near the border at Kafolo. The attackers killed 14 soldiers before roaring away into the bush. Читать дальше...

STALIN RULED the Soviet Union. George V occupied the British throne. America’s public was awed by a young Kansan, Amelia Earhart, who had become the first woman pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. The year 1932 was memorable for many. But Democrats in Kansas recall it for a special reason: that was the last time their state elected a Democratic senator.

ONE OF THE toughest things about covid-19 for Pamela Lazor, as for workers in hospitals across the world, has been watching patients die without a loved one close by. As a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, part of her job is making sure dying patients have the company of a relative or a chaplain if they have signalled a wish for it. As the virus spreads, hospital chaplains are playing a crucial role in the care of patients, their families and the medical staff who treat them. Читать дальше...