Super-loudhailers are becoming louder still
Dec 10th 2020YOU NEED a pretty powerful bullhorn to broadcast a message to someone who is 2km away. But that is what America’s navy is currently looking for. It wants, among other things, to be able to warn the crews of small vessels, who may or may not be hostile, not to come too close…
Elon Musk’s latest rocket launch is a successful failure
Dec 10th 2020″FAILURE is an option here. If you are not failing, you are not innovating.” So said Elon Musk a few years after he had set up SpaceX, his private rocketry firm. And fail, at the end, his most recent test did. On December 9th SN8, the latest incarnation of SpaceX’s Starship, a craft…
Could the pandemic cause economists to rethink welfare?
At the American Economic Association’s annual shindig, Emmanuel Saez argues for changeJan 6th 2021EVERY JANUARY a curious migration occurs. Thousands of economists from around the world flock to a big American city for the annual meetings of the American Economic Association (AEA). The pandemic upended the rite this year, and instead enabled conference attendees to…
Where economists focus their research
Dec 10th 2020AN OLD joke: a policeman sees an inebriated man searching for his keys under a lamp post and offers to help find them. After a few fruitless minutes, the officer asks the man whether he’s certain he dropped his keys at that particular location. No, says the man, he lost them in the…
Bangladesh is moving Rohingyas to a remote island
THE FLOTILLA that sailed from the port of Chattogram (formerly known as Chittagong) in southern Bangladesh on December 4th was carrying some 1,642 refugees to a new life across the water. But their destination was no far-off promised land. It took less than four hours’ churning through the wide, muddy estuary of the Meghna River…
Thailand’s absolutist king is on his best behaviour
Dec 12th 2020THE WEEKS of stand-off between young Thai activists and the establishment they are challenging have not been short of political theatre. The protesters are calling for the resignation of the army-backed prime minister, for open elections and, above all, for an absolutist monarchy to be modernised. They raise the three-finger salute of defiance…
Iran bares its teeth, while its rivals mend fences
THE THIRD day of January marked a year since America assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a talismanic Iranian general who marshalled militias across the Middle East. The mood was febrile. American officials feared commemorative reprisals. Muhammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted that “intelligence from Iraq” indicated an American “plot to fabricate pretext for war”. The USS…
The feuding Gulf states are trying to make nice
MONTHS AFTER four Arab states imposed an embargo on Qatar in 2017, a minister from the emirate made what he thought was a controversial comparison. “To be honest, we consider ourselves like Israel,” he said, referring to another small country isolated in the region. Improbably, almost three years later, this comparison seems too favourable to…