Europese schuldencrisis is klassiek probleem
Lang artikel van een econoom komt hierop neer: de Europese schuldencrisis is een conflict tussen bankiers en werkers. Dat valt op te lossen als je de schulden bij de een of de ander laat vallen: wie moet wat afschrijven. Een relatief simpele economische exercitie. Maar in dit geval zitten de bankiers in het ene land en de werkers in een ander land. Dan wordt het een conflict tussen landen, en dat is een stuk ingewikkelder. Trekt parallellen met de schuldbetalingen door Frankrijk aan Pruisen/Duitsland in 1871-73.
Gastcolumn
De afscheidstoespraak van de hoofdredacteur van The Economist, John Micklethwait. (Als er een betaalmuur tussenzit, dan kunt u ook hieronder kijken waar ik de tekst heb geplakt. Bij wijze van uitzondering.) Westerse democratiën zijn nauwelijks nog een rolmodel; economisch liberalisme likt zijn wonden. Hoe kan een liberaal nog hoopvol zijn?
An editor’s farewell
The case for liberal optimism
John Micklethwait, who has edited this newspaper since 2006, leaves today. These are his parting thoughts
From the print edition
THIS newspaper churlishly deprives its editors of the egocentric adornments of our trade. Tragically, these pages include no weekly “editor’s letter” to readers, underneath a beaming, air-brushed picture. Online, there is a weekly e-mail, but that comes from your “desk”, not you. As editor, you spend your time in deplorable obscurity, consoled merely by the fact you have the nicest job in journalism. But there are two indulgent exceptions: a brief mention when you are appointed; and this valedictory leader, which attempts to sum up the world that has hurtled across your desk.
It starts on the first day, and never lets up. There are elections, coups, wars, bankruptcies and tsunamis. Science throws up discoveries and ideas. A pantomime of Putinesque villains and Berlusconi-style clowns force themselves onto the cover. But for the things this newspaper cares about, the past nine years have been a battle, one that has left me in a state of paranoid optimism. Paranoia because so much remains under threat; optimism because, for the most part, the creed this newspaper lives by is strong enough to survive.
That applies first to The Economist itself. One of my earliest covers asked “Who killed the newspaper?” (August 24th 2006), and this newspaper has arguably faced more change in the past nine years than it did in the previous century. On April Fool’s Day 2006, when, appropriately, I began this job, Twitter was ten days old, our print advertising was growing and social media was something to do with a very good lunch.
So any modern editor who is not paranoid is a fool. But my optimism remains greater, both about The Economist and the future of independent journalism. That is partly because technology gives us ever more ways to reach our audience. In 2006 our circulation was 1.1m, all in print. Now it is 1.6m in print, digital and audio. Already half a million of you have downloaded our new Espresso app; we are adding over 70,000 Twitter followers each week. Media is not the race to the bottom that pessimists forecast. People want to read about the Kurds, Keynes and kokumi (see article) as well as the Kardashians. Ever more go to university, travel abroad and need ideas to stay employable—and will pay for an impartial view of the world, one where the editor, whatever his faults (or from now on, her virtues), is in nobody’s pocket.
Fighting new battles
The same guarded hopefulness applies to an Economist editor’s only true master: the liberal credo of open markets and individual freedom. That liberalism, which stretches back to our founding by James Wilson in 1843, has been attacked from all sides over the past nine years. In 2006 it was still easy to convince yourself that history was ending—that the “Washington consensus” of democracy and capitalism would liberate the world. But freedom’s momentum has sadly stalled.
Democracy is no longer the presumed destination. Countries that looked mildly hopeful nine years ago, such as Russia and Turkey, have acquired tsars and sultans. The Arab spring has turned to winter. Above all, authoritarians have found a new model in China—in which power revolves at the top every decade and economic growth is organised at the bottom. China’s income per person has risen at twice the rate of democratic India’s since 2006.
Western democracy, too, looks ever less exemplary. Barack Obama may have stopped his predecessor’s waterboarding of American values, but Washington remains synonymous with gridlock. In every year of my editorship a clear majority of Americans have told Gallup that they are dissatisfied with the way they are governed. America’s money politics, the target of another editor’s valedictory in 1993, looks ever grubbier and more feudal, with a Bush v Clinton contest beckoning in 2016.
The only way to feel good about American democracy is to set it beside Brussels. Woefully unaccountable and ineffective, the European Union is often held together only by the woman who has somehow managed to be both the West’s most impressive politician and its greatest ditherer, Angela Merkel. But to what end? The near-permanent euro crisis has proved a classic exercise in shambolic decision-making, consisting mostly of agreeing to kick the can down the road.
If liberal politics are rightly attacked, the blows that have rained down on liberal economics have perhaps been even more painful. It is now a commonplace to blame the dominant event of this editorship, the 2007-08 financial crisis, on unfettered capitalism. This is mostly a calumny: the epicentre was the American mortgage market, one of the most regulated industries on Earth, and Leviathan’s hand was all over much of the mess that followed. But part of the charge against capitalism was true, and it hurts. No liberal can justify a system in which huge banks’ balance-sheets teetered on tiny amounts of capital. In 2006 too much of finance was gambling, pure and simple; and too much of the bill ended up with taxpayers.
This helps explain why a feeling of unfairness lingers across the West—visible in the streets of Athens, but also in the pages of Thomas Piketty. People blame liberalism for much of what they fear: whether large-scale immigration, technological change, or just what the French callmondialisation.
Such a reaction is not unreasonable. Globalisation has indeed brought problems in its wake. But it has also done an incredible job in reducing want. Since 1990, nearly 1 billion people have been hauled out of extreme poverty; and the 75m people who bought an iPhone in the last quarter of 2014 were not all plutocrats. Moreover, open markets could do more, not least in the West. Free-trade pacts across the Atlantic and the Pacific would spur growth, while Mrs Merkel could open up Europe’s single market in services. The magic still works, and liberals should be far bolder in making that optimistic case.
But that is not enough. Two great debates are forming that will redefine liberalism. The first is to do with inequality. A more open society, where global markets increase the rewards for the talented, is fast becoming a less equal one. As this newspaper pointed out last week, the clever are marrying the clever and manically educating their children, making it ever harder for the poor to catch up. Liberals should resist the left’s inclination to punish the talented and somehow to mandate equality. But in the name of equal opportunity, progressives need to hack away at unnecessary privileges (like university places for children of alumni) and wage war on crony capitalism. Private equity and Exxon are both clever enough not to need special tax breaks. Four times as much public money goes to the wealthiest 20% of Americans in mortgage-interest deductions than is spent on social housing for the poorest fifth.
These were causes that motivated Wilson, John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone and the great liberals of the 19th century, who waged war on “the old corruption” of aristocratic patronage and protection for the rich, such as the corn laws this newspaper was set up to oppose. But they were progressives who also believed in a smaller state. This is the second debate forming around liberalism, and a dilemma: for although this newspaper wants government’s role to be limited, some of the remedies for inequality involve the state doing more, not less. Early education is one example. Only 28% of American four-year-olds attend state-funded pre-school; China is hoping to put 70% of its children through pre-school by 2020.
Planting liberalism’s standard
The answer is to scale down government, but to direct it more narrowly and intensely. In Europe, America and Japan the state still tries to do too much, and therefore does it badly. Leviathan has sprawled, invading our privacy, dictating the curve of a banana and producing tax codes of biblical length. With each tax break for the already rich and with each subsidy to this business or that pressure group, another lobby is formed, and democracy suffers.
Lessons lie in the private sector. It is often several decades ahead of the public sector in the West. Some of the answer is just good management: if Singapore can pay good teachers more and fire bad ones, so can Stuttgart and Seattle. Other answers lie in experiments at lower levels of government, as among America’s states, and outside the West—in India’s giant heart hospitals and Brazil’s conditional-cash-transfer system.
The battle for the future of the state is an area where modern liberalism should plant its standard and fight, just as the founders of the creed did. Because, in the end, free markets and free minds will win. Liberalism has economic logic and technology on its side—as well as this wonderful newspaper, which I now hand over into excellent hands. And that is my last, best reason for optimism.
S&P500 verslaat slimste beleggers
In 2008 sloot Warren Buffett een weddenschap: de beurs zou het over een periode van tien jaar beter doen dan alle slimmeriken die denken dat ze het beter weten. Om precies te zijn: Hedge fund managers, de best gefinancierde, meest geavanceerde en dus ook duurst betaalde beleggers. (Ze vragen meestal iets van 20% van de winst.) Eind 2014 was de S&P500 gestegen met 63,5%, de vijf ‘funds of hedge funds’ gekozen door Protégé waren +19,6%. Protégé is een money manager die de handschoen van Buffett oppakte. Het punt van Buffett: beter om de schildpad te zijn dan de haas, als in de fabel van Aesopus.
Goud in data
Als je weet wat mensen kopen – bijvoorbeeld door credit card transacties te analyseren – kun je de beurskoers van genoteerde middenstanders voorspellen. Dat ontdekten twee broers, die de transacties van Capital One bekeken. Ze plaatsten call en put opties op basis van hun conclusies en verdienden zo $2.8 miljoen dollar. Helaas waren ze door Capital One in dienst genomen voor ander werk, dus worden ze nu vervolgd door de SEC voor ‘insider trading.’
Nieuwe chip: telefoon 3x krachtiger
Telefoons met de ARM Cortex A72 chip kunnen drie keer zo veel als de beste telefoons nu, met 75% minder energieverbruik. Voorbeeld: als je een vertaalprogramma met stemmen op je telefoon gebruikt, moet hij nu de audio ‘uit de cloud’ halen dus je moet in wifi zijn of breedband hebben. Met de nieuwe chip zou dat gewoon ‘intern’ kunnen. Fabrikant ARM, de grootste fabrikant van chips voor mobiele telefoons, verwacht dat de eerste telefoons met de nieuwe processor in 2016 op de markt zullen komen. Forbes noteert dat smartphones in vijf jaar tijd 50x krachtiger zijn geworden.
Niet te veel rennen
Deense 13-jarige studie concludeert dat 2-3 per week rennen optimaal is, en vooral niet te hard. Te vaak en te hard rennen coïncideert (lelijk woord, maar causaal verband is niet aangetoond) met grotere kans op hartkwalen, net zo groot als voor mensen die helemaal niet rennen.
Waar is Thatcheropoulos?
Griekenland heeft zo iemand nodig: ‘Krachtig, geloofwaardig, vóór schuldonderhandelingen, pro-kapitalisme, anti-corruptie, pro belastingrechtvaardigheid, pro buitenlandse investeringen.’ Helaas wordt Griekenland nu geregeerd door Niet Erg Serieuze Mensen. Voor de verandering hier eens de volledige – korte – tekst van Tyler Cowen’s blog (beetje rommelige layout maar dat is zijn stijl):
Greece needs Thatcheropoulous
Russia announced that it would
There is more here, of interest throughout, though not fundamentally surprising. Greece is seeking to auction its EU veto between the EU and Russia. And over the weekend Chris Calomiris told us that Tsipras is a longstanding admirer of Fidel Castro, and furthermore he named his youngest son “Ernesto” after [Ernesto] Che Guevara. He also has voiced his opposition to Nato in the past.
As I’ve said, these are the Not Very Serious People, enough to make you want to have the Very Serious People back. As Garett Jones has noted, Greece needs its Thatcheropoulous — strong, credible, pro-debt renegotiation, pro-capitalism, anti-corruption, pro-tax fairness, and pro-foreign investment. People, that is not what we are getting.
The best chance scenario is that this is all an elaborate bluff for a pivot toward sensible reform. The bluff I can see, the sensible reform sorry no. Is a Thatcheropoulous possible when one can read headlines such as “Death threats forced me to quit my job, says Greece’s top tax man“? How many of the cultural preconditions of successful reform are present in Greece right now?
Here is the FT on the evolving game of chicken:
Greece’s €172bn bailout
Fortunately, 70% of the Greek public believes that Tsipras will succeed as Prime Minister.
Krachtvoer, geklassificeerd
Door de Centers for Disease Control nog wel, die zijn niet van de straat. Voedsel dat meer dan gemiddeld wordt geassocieerd met uitblijven van chronische ziekten (let op: geen causaal verband) en hoge voedingswaarde heeft.
(dit is een screenshot van een gedeelte van de lijst. Klik er op voor de originele lijst)
Psychedelisch medicijn
Een renaissance in de studie naar therapeutische effecten van LSD en vooral psilocybin, het geestverruimende element in ‘magic mushrooms’ (paddo’s) dat veel dezelfde effecten heeft als LSD maar minder heftig en met minder frequente negatieve reacties. Wetenschappers kijken of psilocybin helpt tegen depressie, zenuwachtigheid en verslaving. Kankerpatienten die één keer een pil kregen meldden na afloop dat ze rust hadden gekregen, en opluchting. Effecten die zes maanden of langer stand hielden. Rookverslaafden stoppen. De tests zijn nog te klein voor een echte doorbraak, maar wel intrigerend. Wetenschappers proberen ook te achterhalen wat er neurobiologisch gesproken nu eigenlijk gebeurt in de hersenen. Wat gebeurt er als iemand een mystieke ervaring heeft? (Het woord ‘psychedelisch’, leren wij hier, is in 1957 bedacht door de psychiater van Aldous Huxley, die op diens advies LSD nam toen hij bezig was te overlijden aan kanker.)
Dieet beïnvloedt Alzheimer
Eten dat lange tijd heeft gerijpt – zoals oude kaas – of bij hoge temperatuur gekookt wordt – zoals rundvlees – verhoogt de kans op Alzheimer’s op latere leeftijd. Vlees, vis, plantaardige olie en kaas bevatten de component (AGE, advanced glycation end products) die Alzheimer bevordert. Granen, melk, eieren, fruit, groenten, noten en knolgewassen leveren minder AGE hoewel niet duidleijk is of dat komt doordat ze op lagere temperaturen worden bereid – of helemaal niet bereid -, of in kleinere porties worden gegeten.