How big is China’s economy? Let the Big Mac decide
Jul 18th 2020AMERICA’S ECONOMY did not exceed China’s in size until the 1880s, according to the Maddison Project at the University of Groningen. The two now rival each other again. Because China’s workers are 4.7 times as numerous as America’s, they need be only a fraction as productive to surpass America’s output. No fewer than…
Did Queen Elizabeth approve the toppling of Australia’s government?
LIKE A TIME-BOMB, they have rested in Australia’s national archives for 42 years. On July 14th the “palace letters” were at last made public, revealing secrets about one of Australia’s most explosive days: November 11th 1975, when the prime minister of the day, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr.Kerr asserted the…
India’s home minister is an unlikely champion of police reform
Jul 18th 2020INDIA’S POLICE are generally better known for spit than polish. Yet even for a public inured to police violence, a slew of recent scandals has proved shocking. To punish a low-caste shopkeeper for staying open a few minutes after a local covid-19 curfew, for instance, officers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu…
South Africa bans alcohol sales
Jul 18th 2020JOHANNESBURGCHARLES DE BRUIN’S phone has barely stopped ringing since 9pm on July 12th, after Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, announced an immediate ban on the sale of alcohol. The prohibition is a boon for pineapple growers such as Mr De Bruin. The fruit is good for home-brewing, he explains; pineapple beer requires little…
A charity in Burkina Faso teaches criminals to sing
WHEN ROLAND TAPSOBA went to prison in 2015 he never dreamed he’d emerge a rock star. The 31-year-old former estate agent was convicted of fraud in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, and sentenced to five years behind bars.He had sung hip-hop for fun in high school. In jail, music became his salvation. Mr Tapsoba learned to…
Teens are disguising as mask-wearing grandmas to try to buy alcohol
Teenagers are dressing themselves up as elderly grandmas in COVID-19 face masks as a way to purchase liquor without showing ID. In an epidemic, no one is aware you’re under 21 years old. That’s what Gen Z has found out as they’ve upgraded the fake ID for the novel coronavirus era, busting in liquor stores…
What if the speed of light were that of a cyclist?
Jul 18th 2020ALBERT EINSTEIN was well known for his Gedankenexperimente, or “thought experiments”, conducted in imaginary versions of the real world. He used them to test ideas that observation could not confirm. But it is also possible to do imaginary experiments in worlds which are themselves imaginary, and thus to illuminate reality in a novel…
Analysing waste water may assist census takers
Jul 18th 2020YOU ARE what you eat, the saying goes. It therefore follows that what you excrete gives away a lot about you. Writ large, that information might yield useful demographic clues about particular neighbourhoods. This, at least, is the thinking behind a study by Saer Samanipour of the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.…
Why globalists and frontier-market investors love Vietnam
Jul 18th 2020AT THE START of February, as the spread of a deadly virus in China became more threatening, Vietnam closed the border. Truckers could no longer ferry components and raw materials from China to local factories. This was a problem for Samsung, a South Korean hardware giant, which manufactures most of its handsets in…
The threat of irrelevance spurs insurers to consider new ideas
Jul 18th 2020IN 2018 MARSH, an insurance broker, teamed up with Munich Re, a reinsurer, and Metabiota, a modelling firm, to launch a policy protecting businesses against losses linked to epidemics. The timing seemed right: the Ebola and Zika viruses had recently crossed entire continents. But many potential clients found the policy too niche and…