The Economist Articles for Dec. 5th week : Dec 31th(Interpretation)

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The Economist Articles for Dec. 5th week : Dec 31th(Interpretation)

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Leaders | The centre can hold

The Economist’s country of the year for 2023

It is possible to enact painful economic reforms and still get re-elected

Historians will not look back on 2023 as a happy year for humanity. Wars blazed, autocratic regimes swaggered and in many countries strongmen flouted laws and curbed liberty. This is the grim backdrop to our annual “country of the year” award. If our prize was for the resilience of ordinary people in the face of horror, there would be an abundance of candidates, from the Palestinians and Israelis in their bitter conflict to the Sudanese fleeing as their country implodes.

Yet since we started naming countries of the year in 2013, we have sought to recognise something different: the place that has improved the most. The search for a bright spot in a bleak world led some of our staff to despair and propose Barbie Land, the fictional pink utopia of a Hollywood blockbuster. But in real life, there are two sets of countries that deserve recognition in 2023.

The first includes places that have stood up to bullying by autocratic neighbours. One cannot say that life in Ukraine improved, but the country valiantly continued its struggle against Vladimir Putin’s war machine, despite wobbling by its Western supporters. Moldova resisted Russian intimidation. Finland joined the nato alliance and Sweden will follow soon. In Asia a number of countries held their nerve in the face of Chinese aggression, often in collaboration with America. The Philippines defended its maritime boundaries, and the law of the sea, against much bigger Chinese ships. In August Japan and South Korea put aside their historical grievances to deepen their co-operation. The island state of Tuvalu, with a population of 11,000, has just signed a treaty with Australia that insures its population against climate change and includes a security guarantee to prevent it from falling under China’s thumb.

Our second group of countries defended democracy or liberal values at home. Fragile, war-scarred Liberia managed a peaceful transfer of power. So did Timor-Leste, which maintained its reputation for respecting human rights and a free press. In some mid-sized countries, such as Thailand and Turkey, hope flickered as the opposition pushed hard to eject autocratic regimes, but those regimes held on at elections skewed in their favour.

Three countries stand out for turning back to moderation after a walk on the wild side. Brazil swore in a centre-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after four years of mendacious populism under Jair Bolsonaro, who spread divisive conspiracy theories, coddled trigger-happy cops, supported rainforest-torching farmers, refused to accept electoral defeat and encouraged his devotees to attempt an insurrection. The new administration quickly restored normality—and reduced the pace of deforestation in the Amazon by nearly 50%. Brazil’s impressive record was marred, however, by Lula’s habit of cosying up to Mr Putin and Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro. As a result, Brazil misses out on the award.

Poland had a remarkable 2023: its economy withstood the shock of the war next door; it continued to host nearly 1m Ukrainian refugees; and to deter Russia it raised its defence spending to above 3% of gdp, giving its stingy nato peers an example to emulate. The country’s biggest problem has been the dominance of the populist-nationalist Law and Justice (pis) party, which has run the government for the past eight years, eroding the independence of the courts, stuffing state media with lackeys and nurturing crony capitalism. In October voters dumped pis in favour of an array of opposition parties. It is early days for a new coalition government, led by Donald Tusk, a veteran centrist, but if it does a good job of mending the damage pis did to democratic institutions, Poland will be a strong candidate for our prize next year.

That leaves our winner, Greece. Ten years ago it was crippled by a debt crisis and ridiculed on Wall Street. Incomes had plunged, the social contract was fraying and extremist parties of the left and right were rampant. The government grew so desperate that it cuddled up to China and later sold its main port, Piraeus, to a Chinese firm. Today Greece is far from perfect. A rail crash in February exposed corruption and shoddy infrastructure; a wire-tapping scandal and the mistreatment of migrants suggested civil liberties can be improved.

But after years of painful restructuring, Greece topped our annual ranking of rich-world economies in 2023. Its centre-right government was re-elected in June. Its foreign policy is pro-America, pro-eu and wary of Russia. Greece shows that from the verge of collapse it is possible to enact tough, sensible economic reforms, rebuild the social contract, exhibit restrained patriotism—and still win elections. With half the world due to vote in 2024, democrats everywhere should pay heed.

Leaders | A dismal year for the dismal science

Economists had a dreadful 2023

Mistaken recession calls were just part of it

image: travis constantine

Dec 20th 2023

Spare a thought for economists. Last Christmas they were an unusually pessimistic lot: the growth they expected in America over the next calendar year was the fourth-lowest in 55 years of fourth-quarter surveys. Many expected recession; The Economist added to the prognostications of doom and gloom. This year economists must swap figgy pudding for humble pie, because America has probably grown by an above-trend 3%—about the same as in boomy 2005. Adding to the impression of befuddlement, most analysts were caught out on December 13th by a doveish turn by the Federal Reserve, which sent them scrambling to rewrite their outlooks for the new year.

It is not just forecasters who have had a bad year. Economists who deal in sober empirical work have also had their conclusions challenged. Consider research on inequality. Perhaps the most famous economic studies of the past 20 years have been those by Thomas Piketty and his co-authors, who have found a rising gap between rich and poor. But in November a paper finding that after taxes and transfers American incomes are barely less equal than in the 1960s was accepted for publication by one of the discipline’s top journals. Now Mr Piketty’s faction is on the defensive, accusing its critics of “inequality denial”.

Economists have long agreed that America would be richer if it allowed more homes to be built around popular cities. There is lots of evidence to that effect. But the best-known estimate of the costs of restricting construction has been called into question. Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, found that easing building rules in New York, San Francisco and San Jose would have boosted American gdp in 2009 by 3.7%. Now Brian Greaney of the University of Washington claims that after correcting for mistakes the true estimated effect is just 0.02%. If builders disagreed as wildly about roof measurements, the house would collapse.

Think social mobility in America is lower than it was in the freewheeling 19th century, when young men could go West? Think again, according to research by Zachary Ward of Baylor University. He has updated estimates of intergenerational mobility between 1850 and 1940 to account for the fact that past studies tended to look only at white people, as well as correcting other measurement errors. It now looks as if there is more equality of opportunity today than in the past (albeit only because the past was worse than was thought).

A rise in suicides, overdoses and liver disease has reduced life expectancy for white Americans. Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton University popularised the idea that these are “deaths of despair”, rooted in grimmer life prospects for those without college degrees. But economists have been losing faith in the idea that overdoses, which are probably the biggest killer of Americans aged 18-49, have much to do with changes in the labour market. New research has instead blamed the carnage on simple proximity to smuggled fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

Other findings are also looking shaky. The long decline in the prestige of the once-faddish field of behavioural economics, which studies irrationality, continued in 2023. In June Harvard Business School said it believed, after an investigation, that some of the results in four papers co-written by Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist and phd economist, were “invalid”, owing to “alterations of the data”. (Ms Gino, who has written a book about why it pays to break rules, is suing for defamation the university and the bloggers who exposed the alleged fiddling.)

What lessons should be drawn from economists’ tumultuous year? One is that for all their intellectual discipline they are still human. Replicating existing studies and checking them for errors is crucial work.

Another lesson is that disdain for economic theory in favour of the supposed realism of empirical studies may have gone too far. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, commentators heaped opprobrium on theorists’ common assumption that people make rational predictions about the world; gibes about an unrealistic, utility-maximising Homo economicus helped raise the status of behavioural economics. Yet rational-expectations models allow for the possibility that inflation can fall rapidly without a recession—exactly the scenario that caught out forecasters in 2023.

A last lesson is that economists should cheer up. The research that has been called into question this year inspired much pessimism about the state of modern capitalism. But a dodged recession, flatter inequality trends and less despair would all be good news. Perhaps the dismal science should be a little less so.

Leaders | Santa tech

Technology is helping Santa Claus come to town more efficiently

A letter to shareholders of Father Christmas Global Inc

image: mikey burton

Dec 20th 2023

Dear shareholders of Father Christmas (fc) Global Inc, ’tis the season for management to update you on the state of the business. Growth in demand continues to be ho-ho-hum. That other implausible global delivery maestro, the stork, has been slacking, so our global customer base has expanded by just 130m infants this year, down from 144m in 2012, bringing the total addressable market to just over 2bn under-15-year-olds. We thus made 2023 the “year of efficiency”, like Meta but jollier.

In particular, we invested heavily in our technological capabilities, to streamline operations, avoid supply-chain bottlenecks and contain costs. Start with logistics. We are ramping up use of sidewalk robots, drones and hypersonic jets. This provides a convenient way to put Donner, Blitzen and the rest of the herd out to pasture, while burnishing our esg credentials by dispelling complaints about animal cruelty.

Satellite production sites near big population centres are being equipped with additive-manufacturing tools, popularly known as 3d printers. Like Alstom, a French maker of trains, which boasts of having printed 150,000 spare parts at its depots around the world, we are making our toy locomotives locally. This helps us avoid supply disruptions, such as those causing some competitors problems in the Red Sea. It will also help us avoid overstocking stocking-fillers. Our green footprint is benefiting from advances in the circular economy. Toys that end up broken by Twelfth Night—which in some years is most of them—are increasingly being recycled into raw materials for the 3d printers.

Our new Santa App for ios and Android offers computer-aided design software for fully customisable gifts. This took inspiration from the system launched in May by Nike for its trainers, and lets us make individualised items at little or no added cost. Forget scientist Barbie: we can do “irritating nine-year-old Jane Smith from Brighton” Barbie. Parents will love it.

Technology is curbing other costs, starting with labour—a blessing in a time of worker shortages. Because 3d printers work autonomously, productivity per remaining pixie has surged. Shortages among service elves are being allayed with the help of Clausgpt, our proprietary chatbot. It can parse incoming correspondence and field complaints. Not loving little Jimmy’s new drum kit? We hope Clausgpt suggests earplugs, not violence.

Virtual ai avatars of Father Christmas reduce the strain on our chief executive. Ozempic, the hot obesity drug of 2023, reduces the strain on his health-insurance bill. It also lowers our key-man risk, which independent analysts now put below that for Elon Musk or Sam Altman.

To limit production costs, we have adopted the open-source risc-v architecture for microchips, which these days feature in most of our products (and everybody else’s). This lets us avoid paying licence fees for semiconductors; Nvidia and its shareholders don’t need any more presents this year. With the promised phase-out of coal, just agreed at the un’s climate summit, the lumps for the badly behaved should become cheaper, too. Superbrats may even get two lumps.

In the spirit of Christmas disclosure, we wish to highlight a number of risks to our business. Some of our new technologies are dual-use, so government export controls threaten deployment. The spread of solar panels, already covering 4m residential roofs in our biggest market, America, is making landings treacherous. Efforts to insulate homes and substitute heat pumps for fireplaces are leading to access problems.

Snow laughing matter

And we cannot count on Amazon and Alibaba, our chief rivals, to remain on regulators’ naughty lists for ever. But we firmly believe that these risks are under control. In the worst-case scenario, we can always fall back on miracles.

China | Chaguan

Why China’s rulers fear Genghis Khan

Repression reaches one of China’s quirkiest ethnic communities

image: chloe cushman

Dec 20th 2023

Harshness is a crude metric for judging an unelected regime. To keep power, lots of rulers will crush dissent with an iron fist. A more subtle measure involves thoroughness. Dedicated autocrats use cold, patient repression to bring even the meek and unthreatening into line. Their aim is to snuff out any belief—no matter how harmless—that might divide subjects’ loyalties.

This grim trend may be seen in the Communist Party’s handling of China’s ethnic minorities, a diverse bunch who between them make up around 9% of the overall population. Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, such groups have lost many of the limited privileges granted to them and faced aggressive campaigns to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture.

Apologists present Xi-era policies as tough but rational responses to threats. The government’s actions in Xinjiang are indicative. To defend China’s cruelties in the region—including mosque demolitions, re-education campaigns, the jailing of poets and the surveillance of millions of Uyghurs and other minorities—officials play up the dangers of Islamic extremism.

National security is also used to justify an intensifying campaign to assimilate ethnic Mongolians who live in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia. New laws mandating the use of the Chinese language over Mongolian in schools and public institutions aim to “safeguard national sovereignty”. When protests greeted similar changes in 2020, the local government responded by making the rules stricter. Citing Mr Xi’s calls for “ethnic solidarity”, the authorities have banned some history books and closed memorials to Genghis Khan, the founder of a dynasty that conquered tracts of Eurasia and ruled China between 1271 and 1368. Defenders of such hardline policies note that Inner Mongolia is a border region, sharing ties of language, religion and history with an independent, democratic country next door, Mongolia.

Revealingly, though, the Xi era has seen moves to smother traditions that pose no conceivable challenge to national security. Chaguan recently travelled to one of the oddest places on China’s ethnic map, the Xingmeng Mongolian Township of Yunnan province. This rural township of about 6,000 people lies in the lush, tobacco-growing hills of southern China near the border with Vietnam—about 2,500km from the grasslands and deserts of Inner Mongolia. Locals claim descent from Mongolian armies, initially led by Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, that conquered the region in the 13th and 14th centuries. In their telling, some soldiers stayed on after their Mongol overlords were defeated and driven back north by Ming-dynasty emperors. After an early flurry of intermarriage with local women, these “Yunnan Mongolians” reputedly settled down as fishermen and carpenters in five villages.

Today locals praise their ancestors for stubbornly declining to marry outsiders, thereby—they insist—preserving traces of Mongolian language and dress for over seven centuries. Declaring himself a descendant of Genghis Khan, a village elder admits that he married a woman from China’s Han majority, “so my daughter is only half Mongolian”. To the elder, a longtime party member, his child is fully Mongolian nonetheless, because she “inherited the spirit of the Mongolian nation”.

Xingmeng’s history was rediscovered in the 1950s, a time of Sino-Soviet amity, by party officials and ethnographers, as well as by envoys from the Soviet-controlled Mongolian People’s Republic. Alas, as Mao Zedong led China deeper into paranoid isolation, ethnic minorities with ancient traditions and links to foreign lands became the target of attacks. After China broke with the Soviet Union and sank into the frenzies of the Cultural Revolution, terrible violence reached Inner Mongolia. Tens of thousands of ethnic Mongolians were killed, accused of treason and feudal thought. Far to the south in Yunnan, minorities were attacked in a “Political Frontier Defence” campaign aimed at border counties. Xingmeng avoided the worst violence, older locals relate, though a temple and ancestral clan halls were damaged. Some temples survived because they had been turned into schools.

After Mao’s death in 1976 Xingmeng enjoyed something of a golden age, as history was harnessed for economic development. Teachers visited from Inner Mongolia to give language lessons at the primary school. Cement replicas of nomads’ tents, horse sculptures and other Mongolian touches appeared. A damaged temple was restored in 1985 as the “Three Saints Temple”, housing statues of Genghis and Kublai, as well as Mongke (Kublai’s brother). A Mongolian folk festival, called Naadam, was held every three years. It began with ceremonies honouring those royal ancestors.

No stately pleasure-domes here

Not this year. No worship of Genghis Khan was allowed as the latest Naadam began in Xingmeng on December 15th (though early that morning some locals quietly slipped into the temple to light incense before the Khans’ impassive statues). At the opening ceremony, a parade featured cloth and bamboo models of fishing boats, shrimp, clams, dragons and a large, dancing white elephant. Missing was a cloth and bamboo model of Genghis Khan on horseback, which appeared at the last Naadam in 2017.

A few years ago Xingmeng’s schools stopped offering Mongolian language lessons. The state has also reduced the number of bonus points given to ethnic-Mongolian students taking university-entrance exams. Pointedly, at the Naadam opening ceremony local leaders hailed Xi Jinping Thought and the ethnic unity of the Chinese nation. In Xingmeng’s cobbled back alleys, your columnist heard wistfulness and fatalism about the new Naadam, rather than revolt. Asked about the changes, an old man said: “All nationalities should unite, and all Chinese should listen to what the party says. Isn’t that how it works with political issues in China?”

It takes an implacable regime to hear such words and still detect a need for stricter controls. China has such a regime.

United States | Jersey sure

Newark may have found a fix for chronic homelessness

Working with police, and converting shipping containers into housing, seem to help

In for the countimage: alamy

Dec 20th 2023 | NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

On a single night every January, volunteers all over America search parks, woodlands, subway tunnels and pavements to count those without shelter. It is part of the annual count mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The point-in-time count results were released, at last, on December 15th. Roughly 650,000 people were homeless, a 12% increase over the year before. The count is the highest since reporting began in 2007. The snapshot is useful for spotting trends and attracting federal funding. Most experts agree it is an undercount and often out of date.

After seeing their own figures for homelessness increase by 20% between 2022 and early 2023, New Jersey officials were shocked into action. Officials tweaked existing programmes and spent more on rental assistance for those at risk of becoming homeless. More services for people living rough has led to a rise in sheltered homelessness. The state also gathers near-real-time data, rather than taking an annual snapshot. In November New Jersey’s Office of Homelessness Prevention released its own figures. They showed unsheltered homeless falling across the state by 23% year on year.

Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and home to the state’s largest homeless population, recorded the biggest decrease. A year ago Ras Baraka, the mayor, unveiled a plan bringing together state, local and private-sector financial support to reduce street homelessness, improve the shelter system and expand housing and prevention services. Mobile crisis teams, behavioural-health providers, community leaders and the police formed a coalition. It seems to be working. Newark has achieved a 58% reduction in unsheltered homeless since the start of the year.

Luis Ulerio, the director of Newark’s Office of Homeless Services, says “there’s just been a lot of hard work behind that number.” The mayor converted a local primary school into a 166-bed facility. He built transitional housing out of shipping containers, a common sight in the nearby port. A second cluster of containers with supportive services, called Hope Village II, will open soon. The containers have been altered to look like little cottages. One woman who had been living in a nearby petrol station for over a year has been persuaded to move in. A third cluster is in the works. Mr Baraka wants to create a pipeline from shelters to transitional housing to giving section-eight vouchers (a federal housing programme) to getting chronically homeless people into permanent housing.

Legal teams offer free counselling and court representation to people who risk being illegally evicted. The city also provides money for back-rent. Beth Shinn of Vanderbilt University points out that there are “lots of points of intervention”, on the theory that it is cheaper to give $200 to help make rent than to pay thousands later. The city also relies on data, updated daily by those working with Newark’s homeless. “What we’re doing is essentially moneyballing homelessness,” says Michael Callahan, head of the state’s Office of Homelessness Prevention. Near-real-time data is crucial, he says, in order to pivot interventions in state policy and on the front line—even helping assign which outreach team will work a certain night shift.

United States | Lexington

Why Donald Trump is gaining ground with young voters

Joe Biden is struggling both on substance and on style

image: kal

Dec 20th 2023

As tastemakers, the two previous American presidents could not present a sharper contrast. Barack Obama, with his elegance and irony, still issues year-end lists of the best music, movies and books, each a triumph of accessible urbanity that blends in just enough Lizzo and “Top Gun: Maverick” to help the Abdulrazak Gurnah go down. To Mr Obama’s mix-mastery Donald Trump counterposed a signature style of ostentatious kitsch. His braggadocio, his combativeness, his gilded lairs, his manner of associating with women: all these led a New Yorker writer, Jelani Cobb, to note as far back as 2015, “in all the ways that matter, save actual performing, Donald Trump is not a politician—he’s a rapper.”

And yet, as president, Joe Biden has found a way to stand apart from both the dj and the rapper, and from all other presidents of the modern era: he is leaving almost no cultural imprint whatsoever. John Kennedy may have altered the course of men’s fashion by not wearing a hat during his inauguration, but Mr Biden failed to spark a revival of The Staple Singers by including their music on his inauguration playlist. Aviator glasses and ice cream cones, maybe a ride in Delaware on a bicycle, are the pop signifiers, to date, of the Biden presidency.

It would, of course, be patronising to suggest that Mr Biden’s lack of engagement with the broader culture, rather than his handling of weighty affairs such as the war in Gaza, is behind his struggle to connect with young Americans. But it cannot be helping. What is clear is that he has a problem, one that encapsulates his overall challenge headed into his re-election campaign. Young voters, who were key to his win in 2020, are just not into him.

No Republican candidate for president has won most voters under the age of 30 since 1988. But a poll by the New York Times and Siena College published on December 19th found Donald Trump leading Mr Biden by 49% to 43% among voters aged 18 to 29. That is a swing in this poll to Mr Trump of ten points since July. According to the Pew Research Centre, in 2020 Mr Biden won that age group by 24 points, 59% to 35%.

The polling has been so dismal for Mr Biden, and also so erratic, and confidence in polling has been so shaken in recent years, that a debate has broken out among political obsessives over whether to trust the numbers. Within national polls, subgroups such as young voters comprise smaller samples and so yield larger margins of error. To control for this, a group called Split Ticket in early December aggregated subgroups across numerous national polls. The results showed Mr Biden leading Mr Trump by a diminished but still substantial margin of 16 points among voters under 30, yet by only three points when young voters were defined as those under 34. That is a sign both that there is static in the numbers, and that the danger to Mr Biden’s re-election is real.

Republicans sense an opportunity. Joe Mitchell, a former Iowa state representative who runs a group called Run GenZ that recruits young conservative candidates, says what he hears most is that “we had more money in our pockets when Donald Trump was president”. But he argues that Mr Trump’s cultural heft is an advantage as it has not been since 2016. Mr Biden, he says, has passed more progressive legislation than Mr Obama but is less admired by progressives because he lacks Mr Obama’s cachet. By contrast, the indictments of Mr Trump have restored his celebrity gleam. “People were displaying his mugshot in a positive way,” says Mr Mitchell, who is 26. “He’s up with the Tupacs of the world.”

The Republican National Committee has created a “youth advisory council”, and it staged its first primary debate in concert with a group for young conservatives. But Republicans have problems of their own. When a college student at that debate asked how the candidates would calm “fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change”, most of them ducked for cover. And in mid-December, five of the 16 members of the youth advisory committee quit, citing a problem evocative of the Trump years: a lack of organisation, goals and vision.

The latest iteration of the Harvard Youth Poll found that Americans under 30 did not much trust either probable nominee. But they trusted Mr Trump more on the economy, national security, the Israel-Hamas war, crime, immigration and strengthening the working class. They trusted Mr Biden more on such issues as climate change, abortion, gun violence and protecting democracy.

In that poll, Mr Biden led by 11 points among all young Americans, but he appears to owe most of that support to Mr Trump. Most of those who favoured Mr Biden—69%—said they did so more out of opposition to Mr Trump; by contrast, 65% of those favouring Mr Trump said they felt loyal to him. That underscores the risk to Mr Biden of a third-party candidate siphoning the anti-Trump vote. The Harvard poll showed Mr Biden’s lead diminishing substantially when people were also asked about such candidates.

Always being boring, never being bored

Mr Biden’s age and lack of cultural effect were advantages in 2020. After the chaos of the Trump years, he was a calming, grandfatherly presence who would never pop up, beet-red and shouting, between images of Taylor Swift and bubble tea in anyone’s social-media feed. “America Votes to Make Politics Boring Again,” the publication Politico declared after that election. On this implicit promise, Mr Biden has not delivered. And the very fact that many of the developments on his watch, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, are beyond his control only reinforces the problem.

This is Mr Biden’s real style problem: he does not appear to be in control. Rather than cocooning the president, his aides need to find more ways to present him as a commanding presence. Failing that, they could make more use of the cabinet secretaries and portray Mr Biden as the wise leader of a high-functioning team. Mr Biden has a good case to make, and he needs to make it both on substance and in style.

Middle East and Africa | Hostage to hell

Israel isn’t sure what to do about the hostages in Gaza

Every option is fraught with danger

The endless waitimage: getty images

Dec 20th 2023 | JERUSALEM

The deaths on December 15th of three Israeli hostages in Gaza, who were misidentified as members of Hamas and shot by Israeli soldiers, highlights how Israel’s dilemmas in reconciling its objectives in its war with Hamas are growing ever more acute. To the desperate families of the remaining hostages it seems clear that their loved ones may pay the ultimate price.

After Hamas’s attack on October 7th, Israel vowed to demolish the Islamist movement militarily, end its rule over the Gaza Strip and rescue 240-plus hostages taken by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Since then, the Israel Defence Forces (idf) has dropped tens of thousands of bombs onto the territory and sent over four divisions of troops into the coastal enclave.

Yet only one hostage has been safely recaptured as the result of an Israeli raid. Around 130 are still being held. Finding and freeing them in a war-zone where around 20,000 Palestinians—a majority of them civilians—have been killed is proving impossible. Nearly half were released in a prisoner exchange during a truce in late November. But Hamas is demanding the release of many more of its own prisoners in Israel and a much longer ceasefire if it is to free any other hostages.

The Israeli government’s position on further negotiations over hostages looks confused. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, at first ruled out resuming the Qatari-brokered talks with Hamas. He also stopped David Barnea, the head of Mossad, the intelligence agency, who is also Israel’s main negotiator, from flying to Doha, Qatar’s capital. But two days later Mr Barnea met Qatar’s prime minister in Europe.

For the moment Israel is resisting pressure for another ceasefire. The idf says it needs more time to destroy Hamas’s extensive tunnel network under Gaza, where many militants are still hiding. The far-right parties in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition are adamantly opposed to another truce.

But Israel’s other war aims look increasingly muddled, too. Mr Netanyahu insists in public that “Gaza will neither be Hamastan nor Fatahstan”: the latter refers to the group that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Yet puzzle-solvers in the Israeli government have been discussing—albeit unofficially—alternative ideas for Gaza’s post-war future which do involve Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

It is also unclear how Israel plans to provide basic aid to the 2m-plus Palestinians trapped in Gaza. “If the idf is to continue its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, there has to be a serious plan for taking care of the humanitarian needs there as well,” says an exasperated Israeli security official. “But the political paralysis means this is happening too slowly.”

Immediately after the massacre of Israelis on October 7th, the government declared that it would not let any supplies enter Gaza from Israel. Aid would have to go through Egypt. Some food, water and medicine would be allowed in, but no fuel.

Since then, fuel has begun to trickle in. On December 17th Israel’s cargo-terminal with Gaza at Kerem Shalom was reopened. Before the war around two-thirds of shipments into Gaza passed through this crossing. Opening it has increased the capacity for sending desperately needed supplies, but Israel is still insisting that any aid comes on a circuitous route via Egypt, rather than directly through Israel, which is much quicker and more efficient.

Among Israel’s Western allies, Britain, France and Germany are now pushing for a ceasefire. On December 17th the British and German foreign ministers called for a “sustainable” one, but did not suggest a date and accepted Israel’s view that Hamas should not be allowed to run Gaza.

Pressure from Israel’s key ally, America, to end the war is still mainly behind the scenes. But Mr Netanyahu is increasingly frank about his rift with the Americans. He presents himself as a defiant defender of Israel’s interests, hoping to shore up his shrinking nationalist base and keep his far-right partners on board. But his focus on his own political survival at the expense of a coherent plan for Gaza means the fate of both Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza looks bleak.

Europe | French style

Why French women no longer wear high heels

A footwear revolution in the world’s fashion capital

image: getty images

Dec 20th 2023 | PARIS

The high-heeled shoe, popular among men in pre-revolutionary France, is losing favour among women on the streets of Paris. The once familiar click of stiletto on cobble is giving way to the silence of rubber soles. Today fashion writers offer French women advice on “les chunky boots”: heavy, black, grooved-sole footwear. Trainers, once derided in the beaux quartiers as an American abomination, are now a daily feature in Parisian cafés and offices. Nearly half of French women, according to a poll, do not know how to walk in high heels. What is going on?

Modern France helped to make the female high heel iconic. Roger Vivier, a French designer, is considered to be the godfather of the stiletto, having designed the aiguille (needle) heel back in 1954. He was the first to insert a metal rod into the heel, stiffening its structure and stretching the female silhouette. The brand still calls stiletto heels “tools of unstoppable seduction”. Christian Louboutin, a French luxury designer, gave the 10cm-high heel a twist with his famous red-soled stiletto, a pair of which goes for around €800 ($870).

Today’s disappearing French high heel is explained in part by covid-19 and the way working from home has spread le look casual. It may also mark a form of post-#MeToo rebellion. A younger generation is turning against the stiletto’s figure-deforming nature—nodded to in the film “Barbie”, whose star’s feet no longer fall flat when relieved of her heels.

During the festive season the high heel—or at least a block version of it—may be enjoying a revival. But this could be fleeting. On the French high street, the trend seems entrenched. “Oh là là, non! That’s over,” says a Parisian shoe-shop manager when asked if she sells many stilettos, waving at the limited range she has relegated to an upper shelf. “Women want comfort,” says an assistant at another store. “What matters is that you can wear flat chunky boots with an elegant dress, and still be chic.”

Business | Bartleby

The return of The Economist’s agony uncle

Max Flannel is back to grapple with your workplace headaches

image: paul blow

Dec 20th 2023

Dear max, I am a 23-year-old social-media marketer who has only recently been required to return to the office. I had been told that the office would be great for having watercooler conversations. My office doesn’t seem to have a watercooler. What should I do?

Now you ask, I’m not really even sure what a watercooler is. But the basic idea is to find a place where you know colleagues are bound to go regularly and where you can engage in light conversation about whether they saw anything good on tv last night. My advice is to hang around any tap and you should meet colleagues fairly regularly.

I have just been promoted into a senior role. I have noticed that many of my new peers like to open meetings with small personal anecdotes about something that happened to them that day—a minor cycling accident, say, or a chance encounter with an old acquaintance. It seems to be a way of getting people to relax a bit. The trouble is that nothing interesting ever seems to happen to me. What should I do?

I wouldn’t worry too much. Those stories are mostly made-up and all deliberately boring. No executive ever opens a meeting talking about how they woke up in their own clothes but in a total stranger’s apartment. The goal is only to put people at their ease by making the speaker seem faintly human. Just say exactly what you put in your message above and then make your face go a bit vulnerable. That should do the trick.

The meeting rooms in our offices have just been given new and quirky names. All of them are different kinds of dips. I’m typing this in Baba Ghanoush; my next meeting is in Taramasalata. Am I alone in wanting to scream?

This is a truly revolting trend. There are people walking around offices right now saying things like “Focaccia seems to be taken. Is Ciabatta free?”, “I’m in Ulaanbaatar. Where are you?” and “Let’s set up a projector in Nelson Mandela”. You either sound totally idiotic or as if you are suggesting something appalling. Just describe the room you are referring to: the one where Mandy gave that terrible presentation, say, or the one where absolutely nothing works.

I recently had a very disturbing thought. I don’t feel like I am an impostor. Does that mean I actually am one?

I’m afraid you have developed non-impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome, the much more common condition, is the worry that you are not good enough to take on certain roles. If you own up to this feeling, you will almost certainly be told that you are way better than the people who blithely hold those roles now. If you have non-impostor syndrome, you start to wonder whether you are one of the people they mean and therefore deeply incompetent. The only known cure for non-impostor syndrome is impostor syndrome.

Whenever I go to the toilets, there’s a new member of staff in there loitering by the washbasins. As I am washing my hands, she asks me whether I have seen anything good on television recently. I have seen her doing the same to other people. Should I report her to hr?

I think I know what’s happened here. Leave this one with me.

I often do Zoom calls from home. I recently tried out a new artificial-intelligence tool that promises to automatically adjust my surroundings so that my home office looks more professional. In all the demos, it does things like remove dirty clothes and straighten books on shelves. But when I try it, it does none of that. All it does is remove me from view and fill in the background so it looks like the room is completely empty. What does this mean?

I called the people who made this tool and they have never heard of this kind of behaviour before. We have looked at your photo on LinkedIn and we do all agree that the ai seems to be making exactly the right call. On the downside, we also seem to be closer to the Singularity.

I can never time my interjections correctly. If I try to judge when a speaker is about to stop talking, I either break in too early and end up apologising for interrupting, or am a beat too slow and someone else grabs the floor. Do you have any tips?

There are only three ways to handle this common problem. One is to start so loudly that everyone immediately gives way. You may come up against a fellow-shouter and then it’s just a battle of nerves: who is going to give way? The second is to raise your hand and wait: you’ll get your turn eventually and be listened to. The third is to get promoted. If you are senior enough, it doesn’t matter how ludicrous a point you are making; everyone gives way. Keep sending me your problems, and enjoy the break!

Business | Schumpeter

Can anyone bar Europe do luxury?

The old continent enjoys a unique blend of heritage, skills and strategy

image: brett ryder

Dec 20th 2023

At this year’s holiday soirées luxury bosses may be stingier than usual with the champagne. It has not been a sparkling six months for the industry, as well-heeled consumers from East to West have tempered the excesses of recent years. The s&p global luxury index, which tracks the industry’s performance, is down by 9% since the middle of the year. Still, the purveyors of splendour need not forgo the merrymaking altogether. The global market for personal luxury goods, from handbags to haute couture and horology, grew by 4% this year, reckons Bain, a consultancy. That is disappointing compared with 20% last year—but nothing to scoff at amid fears of a slowing global economy.

The past two decades have been remarkable for the industry. Global sales have tripled to nearly $400bn, thanks largely to a swelling of the ranks of crazy rich Asians. The biggest beneficiaries of the boom have been European companies. These account for around two-thirds of luxury-goods sales, according to Deloitte, another consultancy, and nine of the world’s ten most valuable luxury brands, according to Kantar, a market-research firm. Bernard Arnault of lvmh, a European luxury goliath, is the world’s second-richest man. The industry remains a rare bright spot for Europe at a time when the continent seems at risk of fading into economic and technological irrelevance. Why has it been so immune to foreign competition?

Heritage is one explanation. Europe’s luxury firms have ridden high on the world’s continuing fascination with the old continent. It is home to seven of the ten most visited countries in the world. Tourists flock to Europe’s historic cities to ogle its artworks, taste its local delicacies and drink its fine wines; the rich and famous gather in the summer for lavish parties on the Riviera. In his book, “Selling Europe to the World”, Pierre Yves Donzé, a business historian, argues that the ascendancy of European luxury is thanks to “the powerful attraction of an idealised way of life, combining elegance, tradition and hedonism”.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1996 Tom Ford, a famed American designer, gushed that Europeans, unlike his compatriots, “appreciate style”. American fashion labels have struggled to break into the most exclusive end of the industry. Even America’s pricier brands like Ralph Lauren concentrate on what insiders contemptuously call “accessible luxury”. In Asia home-grown rivals have thrived mostly in categories like jewellery (China’s Chow Tai Fook or India’s Titan) and cosmetics (Japan’s Shiseido) where local tastes are more pronounced.

Europe, meanwhile, has entrenched itself as the centre of design and craftsmanship in the luxury business. Three of the “big four” fashion weeks take place in European capitals. New York, the exception, has valiantly tried to build a cluster of high-end fashion talent, with design schools to rival those of Milan or Paris. Yet it has lost top designers to European capitals much as Europe has lost techies to Silicon Valley. As Mr Ford saw it, “If I was ever going to become a good designer, I had to leave America.”

Hobnobbing with other fashionistas is not the only advantage on offer in Europe. The continent is dotted with artisanal workshops that have for decades catered to the exacting standards of the luxury industry. Hermès handbags, some of which sell for upwards of $10,000, are produced by experienced craftsmen who can spend 20 hours or more on one bag. Over decades the continent has developed specialised clusters of production, from watchmaking in the Jura Arc of Switzerland to shoemaking in the Veneto region of Italy, where techniques are handed down over generations through specialist schools and coveted apprenticeships.

Europe’s luxury champions deserve credit, too, for pursuing strategies that have reinforced their dominance of the industry. They have been steadily buying stakes in their suppliers, giving them a competitive edge through greater control of production, notes Thomai Serdari of New York University’s Stern Business School. In May Chanel and Brunello Cucinelli, two luxury houses, bought a joint 49% stake in Cariaggi Lanificio, an Italian cashmere supplier. Vertical integration in the industry has stretched all the way back to alligator farms in Louisiana and sheep stations in Australia. It has also extended in the other direction, into distribution, with luxury firms increasingly opting to sell directly to shoppers through their own swanky stores, rather than entrusting the customer experience to others.

All that has required plenty of capital, which helps explain the parallel trend towards horizontal integration in the industry. lvmh now houses 75 luxury brands. Although these mostly operate autonomously, the model provides economies of scale in areas like marketing and back-office functions. It also gives the group the financial firepower to invest in prime real estate. In July lvmh bought the building on the Champs Elysées that houses its Louis Vuitton flagship store. Swatch, which owns watch brands from Blancpain to Omega, controls a portfolio of component suppliers, too. The conglomerate model also helps to lure in top talent by offering opportunities for designers and craftsmen to move between brands, notes Stefania Saviolo of Bocconi University.

Continental drift

Enthusiasm for horizontal integration among European luxury firms has not been universal. Early in the 2010s Hermès fended off a takeover attempt by lvmh. It has done just fine on its own—its shares have outperformed lvmh’s by more than half over the past five years. Other independent luxury brands, however, have struggled to keep up. That is especially so for Italian firms, which account for 23% of luxury’s 100 largest businesses but only 8% of their combined sales, according to Deloitte. Many of these are multigenerational family businesses that have balked at joining forces with old rivals. If they are to maintain their position at the ritziest end of luxury, they may need to swallow their pride.

Finance and economics | Buttonwood

Why bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year

Introducing the cockroach theory of crypto

Dec 18th 2023

Chopping off their heads does not work: cockroaches can live without one for as long as a week. Whacking them is no guarantee either: their flexible exoskeletons can bend to accommodate as much as 900 times their body weight. Nor is flushing them down the toilet a solution: some breeds can hold their breath for more than half an hour. To most, roaches are an unwelcome pest. Their presence is made all the worse because they are indestructible.

An unwelcome pest is how many financiers and regulators would describe the crypto industry. Criminals use cryptocurrencies to launder money. Terrorists use them to make payments. Hackers demand ransoms in bitcoin. Many crypto coins are created simply so their makers can make off with the money.

The industry also appears to be indestructible. Crypto prices were crushed by higher interest rates in 2022. The industry’s head has been chopped off: Changpeng Zhao and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founders of the world’s biggest and second-biggest crypto exchanges, now both await sentencing for financial crimes (breaking anti-money-laundering laws and fraud, respectively). Regulators are cracking down. Yet not only has crypto survived, it is once again soaring: bitcoin climbed to a two-year high of almost $45,000 on December 11th, up from just $16,600 at the start of the year.

What is going on? For one thing, indestructibility is built into the technology. Bitcoin, ether and other coins are not companies—they cannot go bankrupt and be shut down. They employ blockchains, which maintain a database of transactions. Their lists are verified by a decentralised network of computers that are incentivised to keep maintaining them by the promise of new tokens. Only if the tokens fall to zero does the whole architecture collapse. And there continue to be lots of reasons to believe some crypto tokens are worth more than nothing.

The first is that holding crypto is a bet on a future in which use of the technology is widespread. People in despotic countries already use bitcoin and stablecoins (tokens pegged to a hard currency, like the dollar) to store savings and sometimes to make payments. These could be used more widely. Artists and museums are still creating or collecting non-fungible tokens (nfts). As are those looking to flog an image. Donald Trump is selling his mugshot for $99 a piece; he plans to have the suit he was booked in cut into pieces, made into cards and given to punters who buy at least 47 nfts in a single transaction.

During the boom times, the crypto industry raised a lot of money and hired plenty of smart developers. Those that remain are working on new uses, like social-media applications or play-to-earn games. Perhaps these will never be widely adopted. But even the small chance that they work out is worth something.

The second reason is that, with each boom-and-bust cycle, it becomes clearer crypto is not a bubble like tulip mania in the 1630s or the craze for Beanie Babies in the 1990s. Although bitcoin is a volatile asset, its price history looks more like a mountain range than a single peak, and appears closely correlated with tech stocks. Yet it is only moderately correlated with the broader market. An asset that swings up and down, and not in parallel with other things people might have in a portfolio, can be a useful diversifier.

That bitcoin has established itself as a serious asset seems to be the source of the latest surge. In August an American court ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main markets regulator, had been “arbitrary and capricious” when rejecting an effort by Grayscale, an investment firm, to convert a $17bn trust invested entirely in bitcoin into an exchange-traded fund (etf). Doing so would make investing in bitcoin easier for the average punter.

In October the court upheld its ruling—in effect ordering the sec to give way. The biggest fund managers, including BlackRock and Fidelity, have also applied to launch etfs. Given the returns bitcoin has offered in the past, and its correlations with other assets, the result could be a rush of cash into bitcoin, as even sensible investors consider putting small slices of their pension pots or portfolios into crypto for diversification.

Many feel instinctive revulsion when they spy a roach. But in spite of their flaws, the bugs have uses—they turn decaying matter into nutrients and eat other pests, such as mosquitoes. Crypto has its uses, too, such as portfolio diversification and keeping money safe under despotic regimes. And, as has been shown, it is just about impossible to kill.

Finance and economics | Free exchange

Where does the modern state come from?

Economists attempt to answer a profound political question

image: álvaro bernis

Dec 20th 2023

It is part metaphor, part myth and part history. Thomas Hobbes thought life there was nasty, brutish and short. John Locke disagreed, proclaiming that it was where people first learnt how to own things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described it as the place where people were born free, before they became ensnared in chains. Robert Nozick thought that people were so desperate to escape it, there was an inevitable result: the creation of a state.

Ideas about the “state of nature”—how people lived before politics organised itself into governments—have held the attention of philosophers for centuries. Discovering whether it played out as imagined was nigh-on impossible. And yet thinking about what people would do without a government helped answer profound questions. What are the limits of political power? Is the modern state something that citizens would freely choose?

Now, after all this theorising, three economists think they have some empirical answers. According to Robert Allen of New York University, Abu Dhabi, Leander Heldring of Northwestern University and Mattia Bertazzini of the University of Nottingham, the key to understanding the emergence of modern politics is not a metaphor, but the constantly shifting courses of ancient rivers in Iraq. The first states, they argue in a paper published in the American Economic Review, were glued together not as shelters from violence, as Hobbes believed, but by economics.

The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Iraq’s two longest rivers, are home to some of the world’s oldest settlements. Mesopotamia, which 5,000 years ago refined the first known system of writing, earned the area the reputation of “the cradle of civilisation”. The paths of these rivers shift, as floods and droughts cause their beds to flood. When a shift came, some ancient farmers were left without water for their crops.

Mr Allen and his co-authors investigate whether the timing of changes to a river’s course had anything to do with when the number and size of settlements grew. They do so by looking at the effect of the first recorded shift in 2,850bc. This presented farmers with something close to the choice imagined by philosophers when theorising about the state of nature. Those left behind by the river could revert to nomadism. Or they could band together to build irrigation systems to ferry water from distant rivers.

A philosophical question is therefore transformed into something akin to a laboratory experiment, only one set thousands of years ago and extending hundreds of miles across. Moreover, the results of the experiment are clear. A 5km-by-5km square in the basin left behind by a river was 14% more likely to have a settlement, marked by a public building such as a temple or marketplace, 150 years after the shift than in the 50 years before it. Each square was 12% more likely to have a built canal, a form of artificial irrigation that made farming far from rivers possible. Five new cities were created, and only three abandoned. Esnunna, one city along a new tributary of the river, became much bigger.

This, Mr Allen and his co-authors say, is evidence that that the fist states were formed by farmers co-operating for economic reasons. A canal network would have been too large a cost for any to bear alone. But by spreading the cost, the construction was worth it for each. Such decisions were momentous. They represent some of the earliest examples of governments providing infrastructure in return for taxes, and thus the genesis of the earliest states.

The authors then divide centuries of thinking on the origins of states into two camps. The first, which they say ranges from Daron Acemoglu, an influential economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to Karl Marx, supposes that states ultimately emerge from a process of social bargaining. The rich and high-status seize power for personal gain, and periodically dole out services, such as a road, school or police force, in order to keep populations on board. But if this had been the case in Mesopotamia then it would have been in the areas that a river shifted towards that settlements would have formed. After all, they developed richer and more fertile farmland, yielding a bigger tax take.

That Mesopotamian farmers seem to have chosen to band together as the river shifted away lends support to the second camp. Philosophers in this group, who include Locke and Rousseau, contend that governments emerged when people chose to co-ordinate themselves, swapping their freedom to do whatever they wanted for a state that mediates disputes and provides a degree of safety. Mr Allen and his co-authors analyse only Mesopotamian Iraq, but they argue that their results ought to apply more generally to other fledgling states. Governments, in other words, are chosen rather than foisted upon their citizens.

Meandering path

This is quite the landgrab by economists, seizing terrain that is more commonly occupied by political theorists. The study is not flawless. Perhaps an unknown conquest explains the spread of settlements in the period under consideration. Maybe the authors are wrong and the pattern does not hold elsewhere. There were already six cities and many more settlements in the Mesopotamian Valley before its rivers really began to move, and some had existed for a thousand years. The authors insist that they are only interested in how new governments form, but there is a chance they have in fact captured older ones spreading.

The paper is nevertheless bold and valuable. Philosophers have sought for centuries to explain why states emerge. Too little time has been spent considering whether economic factors might have been at play. Although transforming the state of nature into a specific time and place means losing some of its complexity, doing so opens the door to the sort of experiment that could only have been imagined by earlier philosophers. If Hobbes or Locke could have studied something approximating the state of nature about which they were theorising, they surely would have tried.

Science and technology | Robotics

Delivery robots will transform Christmas

Santa’s hi-tech little helpers

image: alamy

Dec 18th 2023 | MILTON KEYNES

Ashop assistant leaves a Co-op convenience store in Milton Keynes and opens the lid of a white box, about the size of a small suitcase, with a red flag on top and six wheels. After the assistant drops a bag of shopping inside and scans a bar code, the box trundles off. Travelling at a brisk walking pace along the footpath, it pauses at a road junction until two cars have passed before crossing safely. Neither pedestrians nor car drivers give it a second glance. Delivery robots like this have become part of the scenery since they started work in this town, some 80km north-west of London, in 2018.

“That’s when you know a new technology is successful,” says Ed Lovelock. “People don’t notice it any more.” Mr Lovelock is product manager for Starship Technologies, a Californian firm that has so far delivered more than 5m shopping orders and restaurant meals in Europe and America using its autonomous Starships.

In some places such deliveries arrive by air. “It soon becomes a normal part of your life,” says Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the boss of Zipline, a drone-delivery firm also based in California. Zipline began using drones to deliver blood and medical products in Rwanda in 2016. It is expanding into groceries and meals and now operates in other parts of Africa as well as America and Japan. In 2024 Zipline will begin deliveries to hospitals and clinics in the north of England for Britain’s National Heath Service.

Where’s my bot?

Like many new technologies, delivery bots have gone through something of a hype cycle. A decade ago many predicted they would soon be everywhere. Amazon, for one, announced with great fanfare ambitious plans for its Prime Air drone-delivery service in 2013, but progress was slow and not much happened. That is changing, and even Amazon’s drones finally look like they are about to take off.

A number of things have brought this about. Companies like Starship and Zipline began modestly in areas where regulators were more comfortable with robotic deliveries. Milton Keynes, for instance, is a new town with wide paths and cycleways for bots to drive along, and with few low-flying aircraft to worry about in the sky above Rwanda, drones can operate safely.

Having steadily gained solid operating experience, officialdom is becoming more relaxed about such services. What that means is, particularly at this time of year, instead of fleets of delivery vans with drivers hauling seasonal gifts and shopping to people’s front doors, an increasing number of goods are arriving by robot.

Starship has gone on to launch services in ten British towns, including older places with narrower streets like Manchester, Leeds and Cambridge. It also makes deliveries on more than 50 university campuses in America. Nor is it alone. Serve Robotics, which is backed by Uber, a ride-sharing platform, began using “sidewalk robots” for restaurant deliveries in Los Angeles in 2022 and aims to deploy some 2,000 in other American cities.

Customers typically use an app to order, with the firms adding a small delivery fee. Depending on distance, this starts at 99 pence ($1.20) in Milton Keynes. Around 100 Starships, each able to carry up to 10kg, serve a number of stores. They navigate along pre-mapped routes using satellite positioning. Sensors, including a dozen cameras and radar, create a “bubble of awareness” around the robot. On arrival, customers use their phone to unlock the robot’s storage compartment and collect their shopping.

It helps that Starships have been made cutesy. Customers in Milton Keynes can choose a song, like “Happy Birthday” for the bot to play on arrival. Some are also decorated for festive occasions, such as “pumpkinbots” during Halloween or “reindeerbots” at Christmas. As a result, adds Mr Lovelock, residents are protective of them and few are tampered with. The bots emit a high-pitched screech if anyone tries to steal them or their contents.

The growing acceptance of delivery bots is helping the idea spread. A trial scheme using sidewalk robots in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, is due to be expanded in the spring of 2024. In November the South Korean government warned people “not to be surprised” by more of them appearing in the capital, Seoul, where the 7-Eleven convenience chain has been testing four-wheel models produced by Neubility, a startup backed by Samsung.

Much the same is happening with drones, although they are not yet dressing up and singing songs. America’s Federal Aviation Administration recently allowed some firms, including Zipline, to fly “beyond-visual-line-of-sight” (bvlos). In America and many other countries drones are not allowed to be flown out of sight of their operators unless ground observers monitor them in case other aircraft are in the vicinity. This restricted how far drones could fly and drove up costs.

Advances in technology helped win these new freedoms. For bvlos flights, new miniaturised sensing devices can be built into drones to detect and avoid other aircraft. Zipline’s system uses specially developed microphones which can pick up the sound of an approaching aircraft and determine its position, allowing the drone to take evasive action if necessary.

Drone highways

In Britain a 165-mile (265km) superhighway for drones, connecting southern England with the Midlands, will start operating in 2024. It will rely on a series of ground stations along the route to communicate with the drones to keep them apart and avoid any other aircraft.

The ability to fly bvlos allows Zipline to offer similar services to its African operations. For these, the company uses a fixed-wing drone capable of a round trip of some 200km. Carrying up to 1.8kg, it is launched with a giant catapult and drops its delivery using a parachute.

The company is starting to work with a number of medical centres in America. In a recent deal with the Cleveland Clinic, it will deliver medicines directly to people’s homes in locations throughout Ohio. For this Zipline will use a new type of hovering drone, able to make round trips of some 30km carrying up to 3.6kg. Instead of a parachute, this drone uses a load-carrying device called a “droid”. After being lowered on a cable, the droid employs a small fan motor to manoeuvre, allowing it to set packages down in precise locations, such as the front steps of a home. This drone-plus-droid system will also be used to deliver groceries and meals.

Both sidewalk robots and drones still require some level of human supervision. Usually this involves people in a control centre monitoring them and intervening if necessary. For Starships, these interventions tend only to come when a bot stops and seeks confirmation that a manoeuvre it intends to undertake, like crossing a tricky road junction, is safe. Zipline’s drones can be called back to base in the event of a problem, or ordered to stop flying immediately and deploy a parachute to land in an emergency. Such events, however, are “extraordinarily rare”, says Mr Rinaudo Cliffton

As for Amazon, it began a limited drone-delivery service in two small areas of California and Texas in 2022. It has since developed a new drone, called the mk30, which it plans to put into service in America, Britain and Italy by the end of 2024. These will operate out of the company’s delivery centres and also use a sense-and-avoid system for bvlos flights. It is quieter than the firm’s existing model, can carry packages up to 2.2kg and will be able to fly in unsettled weather, including light rain.

Amazon is talking about delivering millions of packages by drone every year by the end of the decade. If the giant of online retailing can finally crack the technology, then automated delivery could spread almost everywhere. If not, there are already enough firms demonstrating that, at least in some areas, delivery bots using wheels, wings or rotors are coming your way.

Culture | Holiday history

“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” turns 200 this year

How a poem created our modern Christmas customs

image: getty images

Dec 20th 2023 | TROY, NEW YORK

It is one of the most famous poems in the English language—almost as famous as Christmas itself. A single word is enough to get going: “’Twas”. You know the rest, or probably quite a bit of it.

Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St Nicholas”, better known by its first line, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”, was published on December 23rd 1823 and has been cherished ever since. Yet the poem is not just a jolly bit of festive verse. It imagined the details that have given modern Christmas its shape and character.

W.H. Auden, a poet, wrote in 1939 that “poetry makes nothing happen”. “A Visit from St Nicholas” is an unlikely exception. Eight reindeer, with names like Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen? That comes from Moore’s poem. St Nick coming on Christmas Eve, and not on December 6th, his saint’s day? The poem cemented the shift. But perhaps most important of all, the poem helped transform an unruly winter festival for adults into a peaceful domestic holiday focused on gift-giving and oriented towards children. “A Visit from St Nicholas” tamed Christmas.

The poem has global reach today, but it was first published in the small town of Troy, New York, in the Sentinel. In early December, on a cold, rainy Saturday, Troy honoured its most famous export at its annual holiday festival. In the shadow of a towering pillar dedicated to Trojans who served in the civil war, a troupe of amateur actors staged a charmingly cheesy skit dramatising the poem’s composition, with the help of an elf, a magical mouse, two reindeer and Santa. That evening, Patrick Madden, Troy’s mayor, decked out in a top hat and a black cape, performed a recitation.

The poem’s extraordinary fame is something of an accident, as are its ties to Troy. It was first published anonymously, but 21 years later its author revealed himself. He was not a Trojan but a wealthy Manhattanite. Moore had never intended the poem to have an audience beyond his children, but a family friend sent the text to the Sentinel without his permission. Moore decided to reveal his authorship by including the poem in his collected verse, published at his children’s insistence.

Moore belonged to an upper-crust set known as the Knickerbockers, after a character in a novel by Washington Irving, his friend and fellow Christmas-booster. “You can’t get much more elite than Clement Moore,” says Bruce Forbes, author of “Christmas: A Candid History”. Moore’s father was an Episcopal bishop who served as the president of Columbia College. Moore was an expert on Hebrew and a professor at a seminary established on land he donated. His family estate, called “Chelsea” after the London district, gave the present Manhattan neighbourhood its name.

A war has been waged over authorship, with descendants of Henry Livingston junior, a writer and officer in the revolutionary war, claiming that he, not Moore, wrote “A Visit from St Nicholas”. Some scholars agree, but most do not. Pamela McColl, who has written a history of the poem, dismisses the claims of Livingston’s authorship as “a bunch of family folklore”.

In Moore’s day, Christmas was not as commonly observed as it is today. There is no mention of it in the Bible, and it is entangled with pagan heritage. Scholars think Christmas was initially celebrated in December in order to piggyback on pre-Christian festivals, including Saturnalia (a holiday that originated in ancient Rome, which featured, among other jocular customs, the crowning of a mock king and masters waiting on their slaves).

Christmas did not easily shake its Saturnalian roots; it had a party-like atmosphere that makes Mardi Gras look tame. Historically, on Twelfth Night in Britain, the poor could enter the houses of the rich and demand food, drink and sometimes even money in a ritual called “wassail”. (To this day, officers in the British army serve the lower ranks a Christmas meal.)

In Moore’s New York, which was experiencing a destabilising population boom, gangs would carouse in wealthy neighbourhoods on Christmas. The Knickerbockers sought to do away with that noisy tradition and reshape the holiday. With “A Visit from St Nicholas”, Moore helped inspire its transformation from “a public, rowdy celebration in the streets into a kind of respectable, domestic Christmas”, says Thomas Ruys Smith, a professor at the University of East Anglia. That makes him “the foundational writer of Christmas in the 19th century”, argues Mr Smith.

“A Visit from St Nicholas” is more sophisticated than its 56 lines suggest. Moore sets his story at home, which replaced the street and pub as the site of Christmas festivities in the Victorian era. He presents Santa Claus coming down the chimney not with a rod to punish wrongdoing but instead with a “sleigh full of toys”.

Moore’s St Nick is somewhere between a folkloric creature and the modern department-store Santa: “chubby and plump”, yes, but “a right jolly old elf”, who flies in a “miniature sleigh” pulled by “tiny” reindeer. Rather than looking like a fourth-century bishop or sporting the candy-cane colours he would later receive from illustrators, Moore’s St Nick bears all the signs of a working man. He looks “like a peddler just opening his pack”, wearing an outfit “all tarnished with ashes and soot” and smoking a “stump of a pipe”. (Long pipes were reserved for gentlemen.)

A certain paternalistic vision may underlay this humbling of St Nick; he is a friendly version of the peasants who took over their masters’ houses. But instead of asking for something, he gives. Moore draws the focus away from the holiday’s subversive spirit and “creates this form of gift-giving and people coming to your door in ways that aren’t threatening”, says Maria Kennedy, an expert on folklore at Rutgers University. (Who could fear a guy whose belly jiggles “like a bowl full of jelly”?)

Moore also scrubs St Nick and the holiday of virtually all religious associations, a move that might have contributed to its broad appeal. Cleansed of class conflict and freed from theological baggage, this was a more appealing Christmas.

Reign of the reindeer

The poem immediately proved popular, spreading in the American press at a speed “more rapid than eagles” (as Moore described St Nick’s sleigh). In the 1850s “A Visit from St Nicholas” was widely reprinted in Britain. Prince Albert might have set down the German roots of the Christmas tree in Britain, but it was Moore’s poem that inspired Britons to hang stockings.

Two hundred years on, merry misrule is safely consigned to memory, and Moore’s vision of Christmas has become widespread. Yet the poem has not yet reached its peak. Sally Veillette, a native of Troy, has commissioned new translations of the poem in 20 languages, including in Italy’s Sicilian dialect and India’s Malayalam. They are available in print and as animated e-books, complete with jingling holiday music. In 2023 Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, officially proclaimed December 23rd “’Twas the Night Before Christmas Day”. Even the First Lady is getting involved, with early editions of the poem on display at the White House.

Moore might have preferred to be remembered for his work compiling the first American Hebrew dictionary or for his philanthropy. But books have their own destinies, as the saying goes. Poems do, too. “A Visit from St Nicholas” does not just describe a Christmas miracle: in its extraordinary success and cultural impact, it is one, too.