Christmas reads from The Economist

Some articles from The Economist's Christmas double issue.

The first article uses Agatha Christie's Orient Express to tell the remarkable story of how a well-endowed network of railways in the MENA region fell prey to colonial ambitions and the region's political intrigues and civil wars. The story starts with the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire which embraced the arrival of railways by building an elaborate network  encompassing Khartoum, Alexandria, Tripoli, Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, Damascus, Medina, Homs, Aleppo, and Basra.  

However, the network was destroyed by the colonial and post-colonial rivalries and wars that have been the bane of the region. The British (and TE Lawrence was the primary culprit in blowing up dozens of railway bridges), Bedouins with support first from Lawrence and later the Al Saud family, and finally the Zionists and Israel were the main culprits in one of the worst infrastructure destruction episodes in history. Regional conflicts and civil wars added the final touches on the destruction. The article has a beautiful description of the dismemberment,

The Middle East had been a cosmopolitan hotchpotch of languages, ethnicities and sects since civilisation began. The railroads tossed them together like fruit in a bowl... Seventy years later the tracks that joined continents lie in wreckage. From Morocco to Iraq not a single train crosses borders. Rusting carriages and engine hulks litter the sands. Cypress trees sprout between Lebanon’s lines. Rails were smelted into bullets like ploughshares into swords. Sleepers reinforced trench walls, and stations and repair yards became barracks and prisons. As in the murder on the Orient Express, the network fell victim to multiple blows. Tracing culpability is one of the region’s great whodunits... 

Like the 12 killers aboard the Orient Express, the region’s rulers each had a motive. The colonial powers carved up the Middle East. The generals who succeeded them prioritised their parcels of territory over the common market and culture developed across millennia. Tinpot dictators saw cosmopolitanism and connectivity as threats to new national identities. Religion lost its universality and shrank into cults tied to plots of land. Syria expelled its French inspectors. Iraq’s railway administration sacked its Jewish managers. Bereft of expertise, many lines fell into disrepair. Train lines became like ancient silk-road souqs and bazaars, relics of a past when riches came from regional trade rather than the rent of a single raw material, be it oil, gas or phosphates. 

The second article looks at the widely prevalent North-South rivalries across European countries. This about Belgium, a country just 222 km long,

Formally, Belgium’s splits are linguistic, with its 11.5m people mostly shared between a Dutch-speaking north and a French-speaking south. In reality, language is clearly seen as a badge of tribal belonging. In both Dutch-speaking Flanders and Francophone Wallonia, it is common to hear people declare that the country’s linguistic border—which runs from east to west, dividing the capital, Brussels—is nothing less than the frontier between the Germanic and the Latin worlds... As northerners, the Flemish are called hardworking, dour and thrifty, a race of early-to-bed merchants and farmers, inhabiting a land of flat cabbage fields and drab coastal lowlands. As southerners, the Walloons are deemed wily, lazy and corrupt: a race of drinkers and dreamers, faded gentry and public servants employed in vast numbers by a bloated patronage system... In Flanders the grumble is that Walloons—who in the 19th and 20th century lorded it over their Flemish neighbours—are too arrogant and welfare-addicted to learn Dutch and move to their country’s dynamic north... In 1921, a historian, Emile Cammaerts, traced his country’s divisions back to fifth-century wars that saw pagan Frankish tribes from the Germanic north attack Christian Belgo-Romans in the south, only to be stopped by an impenetrable physical barrier: the Silva Carbonaria, a long-vanished forest that ran along the line of today’s linguistic frontier.

The same stereotype exists in France, Spain (Catalan north and Galician south), Italy, and even America. So, this about the general north-south stereotypes,

Within many countries, strikingly similar north-south stereotypes crop up time and again. Such prejudices are often defended by references to climate, topography and history. Northerners are hailed for hard work and thrift. Northern agriculture is praised for its efficiency, which is often linked to an early abolition of feudalism creating lots of small farms owned and worked by sturdy, self-reliant yeomen. Southern regions are deemed friendlier but blighted by clannish corruption and idleness. If southern farms are less productive, harsher weather is only one explanation. Another involves the legacy of vast estates on which hard-pressed, semi-literate peasants laboured well into the 20th century.

Such stereotypes exist outside Europe in China, India, Korea, Vietnam, and Australia, though in all these cases the stereotype is reversed with the Southerners claiming superiority over the northerners. 

However, closer examination reveals the problems with such stereotypes, 

Look at a map, and it becomes clear that one person’s north is another’s south. Take supposedly cold, northerly Barcelona. It lies some way south of the sun-baked, southern French city of Marseille, and enjoys almost the same climate... on a map of Europe, distinctively northern Italy is not in the north. Indeed haughty, handsome Florence lies on a lower latitude than Avignon, in the southern French region of Provence... The idea that warm places are lazy is impossible to separate from long-debunked theories of racial superiority, seeking to explain why white Europeans conquered African, American and Asian colonies with such brutal ease. Over the years, north-western Europeans came up with self-serving theories to explain why Providence had ordained that they should run the world. They boasted that their climate was just bracing enough to inspire men to industry, whether that meant weaving fine clothes or building cities of brick and stone, without being so cold as to make agriculture impossible. They scorned hot places where fewer clothes are necessary, and food supposedly falls from trees. In fact, the link between temperate weather and invention is distinctly weak. Until well into the Middle Ages, northern and western Europe were backwaters. Whether studying the history of mathematics, medicine or literature, civilisation flowed from east to west, carried from the Mediterranean basin, the Islamic world and China to damp, chilly places like Germany or the British isles.

The third article traces Julius Caesar's nine year long conquest of Gaul (modern France) through his first-hand account of his campaign, "Commentaries on Gallic Wars". The campaign that conquered France built Caesar's myth and helped build the foundation for his assumption as the Roman dictator.

He shaped the political geography of Europe. He ensured that French words such as liberté, égalité, fraternité, vin blanc and croissant all have Latin roots. He gave the world a calendar that more accurately reflects the time it takes Earth to go around the sun and that is still used. Today only two days are named after Jesus Christ, but Caesar and his heir each have a whole month. The words “kaiser” and “tsar” derive from his name.

The fourth article describes how technology has made it easier to sell old clothes. 

In 2021 resold clothing fetched around $15bn, up from less than $1bn in 2013. A further $21bn was spent on garments from charity and thrift shops. The total spent on second -hand garb, some $36bn, is slightly bigger than the $30bn spent on “fast fashion” in shops such as Zara or H&M. By 2025, according to GlobalData, a research firm, the value of resold and thrifted clothing will climb to $77bn as resale revenues triple to $47bn annually and charity-shop revenues climb to $30bn. Combined revenues will dwarf those from fast fashion which are expected to grow to just $40bn... According to estimates from GlobalData last year saw over 33m new buyers and 36m new sellers of old garb... A poll in 2016 by GlobalData found that 45% of adults had bought second-hand clothing, or said they would consider doing so. That share is now 86%.

This assumes great significance given the short shelf life of fast fashion clothes - 95% of clothes sent by Americans to landfills are good enough to be resold - and clothing manufacture and distribution account for 2-8% of global carbon emissions. 

The fifth article describes an old problem, figuring out a satisfactory enough voting system. It has a reference to the quadratic voting (QV) proposal put forth by Glen Weyl.

In its simplest version, each voter would be given a budget of “marks” as Carroll might call them or “voice credits” as Mr Weyl calls them. Voters could use these credits to “buy” votes for a candidate or proposal. The first vote for a candidate costs one credit. But casting two votes for a single candidate costs four credits (ie, two squared); casting three costs nine (three squared), and so on. Under this scheme, people buy votes with their credits just as countries “earn” votes with their populations in Penrose’s imagined assembly. In both cases, the aim is to give voters as much sway as their population or passion warrants. But no more so.

Compared with the method of marks, QV makes it harder to “lump”’ votes. That is because each additional vote for a single candidate costs more than the last one did. (A second vote costs an additional three credits; a third vote costs an additional five.) Thus instead of buying increasingly expensive votes for their number-one choice, voters are nudged to cast some relatively cheap votes for second- or third-choice options. In this way, the method encourages compromise. In the book “Radical Markets”, Mr Weyl and his co-author Eric Posner argue that the method could potentially work well in organisations large and small, from the United Nations to presidential elections, from shareholder meetings to homeowner associations... In principle, this... gives people a reason to express, but not overstate, the intensity of their feelings.

This experiment proves the point,

Distinguishing strong from mild support is equally valuable in opinion polling. In 2016 David Quarfoot of the University of California, San Diego and his co-authors put ten controversial policy proposals to 4,850 American voters. They included proposals to raise the minimum wage, deport illegal immigrants, repeal Obamacare and tax the rich. Some of the voters were asked to respond on a conventional scale (from strongly approve to strongly disapprove). Others were given a budget of 100 voice credits to spend quadratically. In the conventional survey, people tended to gravitate to one end of the scale or the other. They expressed strong approval or disapproval, just as online reviewers tend to give five stars or none. In both cases, a strong statement costs nothing. In the quadratic poll, people faced a constraint. Expressing vehemence on one issue required them to weaken their stand on another. This constraint forced them to be more discerning about their passions.

And quadratic voting has made its debut in a few places,

The Democratic legislators used QV to help pick which of many possible spending bills they should push in the year ahead. It is also used in Taiwan to help decide among the innovations cooked up in the annual Presidential “Hackathon”, which challenges civic entrepreneurs to use data to improve public services. In Brazil the city council of Gramado has also used quadratic voting to set its priorities for the year and to find consensus on tax amendments.

The final article examines the importance of Ukraine to Russia. It writes,

The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war. For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith. Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European... Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians... One of their (Russians') grievances was the loss of Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea reallocated from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian republic in 1954 but still seen as part of Russia by most Russians. A holidaying place for both the Soviet elite and for millions of ordinary people, it had been at the heart of the imperial project since the days of Catherine the Great.