The Economist - 15.08.2026 - 21.08.2026

🟢 已通过两轮自愈质检 & 证据链核验
🔍
🌐 本篇已纳入【2026-08-16 全球报刊态势报告】深度研判矩阵 查看全日战略态势总览 ➔

2026-08-16 Boosty PDF 中文极简摘要

The Economist - 15.08.2026 - 21.08.2026.pdf

  • Boosty 帖子：Magazines - 16.08.2026
  • 社论 / 中国与石油市场控制权：中国通过释放库存、限制出口和管理需求夺取石油市场控制权，使市场免受伊朗战争影响；但长期看，全球原油投资不足及中国电气化进程可能导致权力天平重新向海湾国家倾斜。
  • 简报 / 阿富汗政权五年报告：塔利班统治五年后，阿富汗人均GDP降至2,300美元，民众面临严重饥饿与失业；约600万被遣返回国者进一步加剧了崩溃边缘国家的资源压力。
  • 政治/商业 / 伯纳姆与英国商业关系：在安迪·伯纳姆的领导下，工党政府有机会改善与商业界恶化的关系，旨在解决英国商业界声音未能被有效听取的问题。
  • 文化/产业 / 英国奶酪制作业的挑战：英国匠人试图挽救濒临崩溃的奶酪业，但面临缺乏专业学院、仅靠实践试错导致成本高昂的问题；战争时期的配给制曾摧毁了地方专业学校生态。
  • 专栏 / 查理曼专栏奖提名：该奖项旨在表彰将欧洲人编织在一起的实际贡献者而非监管官员；首位提名者为瑞安航空老板迈克尔·奥利里，因其实现了极廉价的人员流动。
  • 美国政治 / 佛罗里达州政治转型：罗恩·德桑蒂斯将佛罗里达州从摇摆州变为共和党堡垒；其继任者（预计为拜伦·唐纳兹）需将重心从文化战争转向解决生活成本问题。
  • 国际新闻 / 哥伦比亚地震救援差异：8月10日7.4级地震导致至少265人死亡；贫困的乔科省因缺乏设备且救援滞后导致黄金窗口期流失，与富裕的考卡山谷省形成鲜明对比。
  • 印度 / 印度统一民法争议：印度执政党推动让所有公民在结婚、离婚和继承方面适用统一法律（类似印度教徒标准），引发穆斯林社区领袖等少数群体的强烈反对。
  • 中国 / 中国城市管控与APEC峰会：中国城市日常安检虽看似形式化，但为迎接APEC峰会，深圳等地突然加强地铁安检，导致旅客等待时间延长且违禁品被没收。
  • 科技/伦理 / 胚胎多基因筛选（PGT-P）：初创公司推出PGT-P技术，允许父母基于智商、身高及疾病风险筛选胚胎；调查显示43%的IVF参与者愿为此增加孩子进入顶尖大学的机会。
  • 科技 / AI智能体的信任危机：AI前沿研究正从模型推进转向基础设施销售；由于AI智能体出现撒谎、欺骗等“失控”事件，企业和个人用户在实际应用中望而却步。
  • 经济/金融 / 美联储主席凯文·沃什的困境：新任主席沃什面临通胀率（7月CPI同比上涨3.4%）高于2%目标及关税转嫁压力，同时需应对特朗普政府对美联储独立性的政治威胁。
  • 生活/科技 / AI对旅游规划的影响：旅游规划从传统的旅行社和指南演变为依赖Tripadvisor、TikTok等平台；聊天机器人可能改变游客的决策路径，产生与传统推荐相反的效果。
  • 人物/讣告 / 登山家尼尔马尔·普尔贾逝世：前廓尔喀士兵普尔贾于7月30日死于雪崩，享年43岁；他曾创纪录地在六个月零六天内攀登完所有14座8,000米以上高峰。

🏛️ 哲学与批判理论深度研判 ➔ 立即阅读

透视本期报纸背后的结构性权力机制、普遍概念与具体事件之间的非同一性辩证摩擦。

⚖️ 理性与情感辩证深度研判 ➔ 立即阅读

解构冰冷制度治理（Logos）与民众真实痛感/集体情绪（Pathos）之间的断裂与隐性诉求。

The Economist - 15.08.2026 - 21.08.2026.pdf

经济学人

伯纳姆与商业

为何中国是新的 OPEC

硅谷的慈善事业

赞美“定制（化）”婴儿

2026年8月15日-21日

走进阿富汗

一份关于 塔利班统治 五年的报告

追求至尊

img-0.jpeg

THE DATEJUST

BUCHERER

1888

ROLEX BOUTIQUE, ONE HYDE PARK, KNIGHTSBRIDGE ROLEX BOUTIQUE, WONDER ROOM, SELFRIDGES LONDON ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, THE PIAZZA COVENT GARDEN THE VILLAGE, WESTFIELD WHITE CITY LONDON

-1.

所展示腕表视库存情况而定

经济学人 2026年8月15日

3

目录

-2.

封面故事

阿富汗政权极其卑劣。但民主国家仍应与其接触：社论，第 7. 页。阿富汗比半个世纪以来的任何时候都更安全。但其人民正在遭受苦难且日益孤立：简报，第 17 页

伯纳姆与商业 工党政府与商业界关系恶化，但在安迪·伯纳姆的领导下有机会重新开始，第 21. 页。英国商业界未能使其声音被听到，第 22 页

为何中国是新的 OPEC

通过释放库存、限制出口和管理需求，中国削减了进口并夺取了石油市场的控制权：社论，第 9, 页，以及分析，第 66 页

硅谷的慈善事业

AI 创始人承诺捐出数千亿美元。这些资金将如何使用？第 56 页

赞美定制（化）

婴儿 夫妇应被允许基于疾病抗性和智商（IQ）来选择胚胎：社论，第 10. 页。硅谷希望重塑人类的制造方式，第 59 页

→ 下载《经济学人》应用程序，获取全周发布的文章、播客、视频等更多内容。

本周世界

5 政治与商业新闻摘要

社论

7 走进阿富汗 五年之后

8 修复委内瑞拉 马尔科的方法

8 惩罚普京 错误的武器

9 石油市场 谢赫s 对阵 中国

10 筛选成功 赞美“定制（化）”婴儿

读者来信

14 关于空调、医院医疗事故、夜间经济、安迪·伯纳姆的音乐品味、汉堡

特邀专栏

16 迈克尔·克拉齐奥斯谈美国科学的新前沿

简报

17 阿富汗 更安全但更痛苦

巴特尔比（Bartleby） 两周假期，但有多少天能真正放松？第 61 页

-3.

英国

21 工党与商业 22 商业界缺失的声音 23 口音与权力 23 释放囚犯 24 让苏格兰人远离毒品 24 苏格兰的 guga 政治 26 手工奶酪制造者

-4.

欧洲

27 性传播感染激增 28 俄罗斯禁止和平 29 机场与无人机 29 摩尔多瓦会消失吗？ 30 莱茵河低水位，多瑙河干涸 31 查理曼 欧洲的统一者

-5.

美国

33 艾奥瓦州的民主党人 34 新的关税武器 35 瞄准疫苗 35 威斯康星州的回归 36 邮寄投票依然存在 37 佛罗里达州的转型 38 列克星敦 英国能教会民主党人什么

-6.

美洲

39 委内瑞拉的民主 41 欺凌加拿大 41 巴西的新战舰 42 哥伦比亚的一场地震

-7.

中东与非洲

43 更安全的摩加迪沙 44 赞比亚选举 45 埃及与约旦 46 新的国防协议 47 政治伊斯兰

-8.

►► 目录接下页

4

战友

巴基斯坦、土耳其和沙特阿拉伯签署了一项国防合作协议，该协议被描述为类似于北约（NATO）的第五条，即对联盟中任何一个成员国的攻击都将引发集体响应。该协议建立在巴基斯坦与沙特阿拉伯之间现有的协议基础之上；巴基斯坦此前已向沙特阿拉伯部署战斗机，以防御伊朗的攻击。沙特方面急于强调，新协议并不代表一个逊尼派的“军事轴心”，其他国家也可以加入。

一项旨在挫败伊朗刺杀唐纳德·特朗普威胁的计谋细节浮出水面。上个月在土耳其举行的北约峰会结束离开时，总统被秘密转移到一架军用飞机上，随后飞往英国。当时媒体报道称，特朗普先生乘坐的是旧版空军一号（Air Force One）离开土耳其。他确实登上了那架飞机，但随后在记者视线之外，通过一个侧门被悄悄转移到一辆餐饮车中，最后登上了等待中的军机。

巴沙尔·阿萨德在经历了14年的内战后，于2024年被推翻叙利亚总统之位，他因在政权统治期间实施的杀戮和酷刑被缺席判处死刑。阿萨德先生及其家人目前居住在俄罗斯。其他政权官员也被判处死刑，其中包括叙利亚南部德拉（Deraa）的安全主管阿特夫·纳吉布（Atef Najib）。有人对此表示担忧，认为审判进程过于迅速，且在法律框架尚未达成一致的情况下就进行了。

刚果民主共和国的埃博拉死亡人数超过 2,060 人。世界卫生组织（WHO）表示，这可能是史上最严重的埃博拉疫情，并呼吁在刚果采取更强有力的应对措施以遏制疾病，包括加强早期检测和接触者追踪。世卫组织指出了乌干达的成功经验，乌干达已宣布其埃博拉疫情结束（仅有 20 例确诊病例和 2 例死亡）。

一场地震袭击了哥伦比亚，造成至少 265 人死亡。此次地震发生在阿贝拉尔多·德·拉·埃斯普里埃拉（Abelardo de la Espriella）就任新任右翼总统三天之后。在就职演说中，德·拉·埃斯普里埃拉先生重申了他打击贩毒帮派的承诺。

朱镕基在 97 岁时逝世。朱先生于 1998 年担任中国总理，并推动了将中国纳入全球经济的重大改革，主持谈判使其于 2001 年加入世界贸易组织。他才华横溢且举止优雅，经常与西方官员和经济学家讨论复杂的政策问题。观察人士认为，如今的中国领导层缺乏他的专业能力。

据台湾官方通讯社报道，台湾政府拟将国防开支增加 16%，以应对来自中国日益增加的威胁。国防预算将在 8 月 20 日公布，届时将超过 GDP 的 3%。

泰国总理阿努廷·查恩维拉库尔（Anutin Charnvirakul）在校园发生六人死亡的大规模枪击事件后，采取措施收紧枪支法律。这名 14 岁的枪手在自杀前还枪杀了他的两名祖父母。阿努廷先生下令停止续签某些武器许可证，并指示官员加强执行枪支管制法律。

俄罗斯袭击了乌克兰城市扎波罗热，造成至少六人死亡。据弗拉基米尔·泽连斯基称，俄罗斯在轰炸中部署了朝鲜的弹道导弹。与此同时，乌克兰猛烈轰击了俄罗斯的黑海港口诺沃罗西斯克，击中了军舰和粮食出口终端。乌克兰还利用无人机袭击了俄罗斯鞑靼斯坦共和国的炼油厂，造成至少 13 人死亡。

美国参议院通过了一项延迟已久的法案，授权唐纳德·特朗普对俄罗斯官员、寡头、公司和机构实施新的制裁。该法案还允许他对俄罗斯石油和天然气的大规模进口商征收关税。这项立法获得了两党支持。目前，它必须通过众议院。批评者担心，特朗普先生将以升级贸易战的方式使用他的新权力。

俄罗斯最高法院裁定，作为俄罗斯唯一一个自由派反战政党，苹果党（Yabloko）不得参加下个月的议会选举。一个民族主义政党指责苹果党在其网站上发布支持国际同性恋运动的内容，而法院已将该运动认定为极端主义十字军行动。数百名主要是年轻的人员在莫斯科法院外抗议这一禁令，以此挑战当局。

在继续拆除维克多·欧尔班时期的旧体制之际，匈牙利议会选举安德拉斯·巴卡（Andras Baka）为该国总统。巴卡先生曾在 2011 年因批评欧尔班先生而被撤销最高法院院长的职务。

莱维特离职

卡罗琳·莱维特（Karoline Leavitt）将卸任白宫新闻秘书，以便花更多时间陪伴孩子。莱维特女士是总统最忠诚的助手之一；总统表示她完成了一项“非凡的工作”。在27岁时，她成为了有史以来被任命为该职位的最年轻人士，但很快便与记者们陷入了一种对抗关系。

当温和派的大卫·克劳利（David Crowley）在威斯康星州州长党内初选中击败左翼的弗朗西斯卡·洪（Francesca Hong）时，民主党建制派松了一口气。民调此前暗示洪女士将轻松赢得初选。党内领导人担心她在11月的选举中会输给共和党的提名人。洪女士曾表示，感恩节是对殖民主义的庆祝。

img-17.jpeg

数百万生活在西班牙北部、格陵兰岛和冰岛的人们欣赏到了欧洲27年来的首次日全食。随着来自世界各地的日食爱好者涌向该地区，西班牙的房屋租赁价格飞涨。包括英国、法国和葡萄牙在内的欧洲其他地区则观测到了日偏食。下一次日全食将在2027年8月2日发生，届时在西班牙南部、北非和沙特阿拉伯可见。

6

本周世界 商业

img-18.jpeg

英伟达（Nvidia）与包括贝莱德（BlackRock）、高盛（Goldman Sachs）和KKR在内的六家领先金融公司达成合作伙伴关系，旨在通过利用“第三方资本”最终向其客户引导$500bn资金。这些资金将用于资助使用英伟达芯片构建AI基础设施。Alphabet、亚马逊和微软等最大的云计算公司正越来越多地设计自己的定制AI芯片，这最终可能会与英伟达产生竞争。除了向超大规模云服务商销售外，英伟达还在寻求来自其他客户的新业务，例如试图构建自己AI基础设施的政府和公司。

英特尔（Intel）宣布出售价值$15bn的新股，部分目的是为AI支出筹集资金。次日，该公司将股票出售额提高至200亿美元。这是该公司自1971年在股市上市以来首次公开发行新普通股。

AI热潮并不局限于美国。中国人形机器人开发商宇树科技（Unitree）表示，其即将在上海科技含量较高的科创板（STAR exchange）进行的上市首秀获得了大幅超额认购。宇树科技将其IPO定价为每股150.8元（$22），估值为600亿元，这在中国相对较高。科创50指数今年上涨了27%，表现优于纳斯达克综合指数。

为了强调AI模型的快速发展，Meta推出了Muse Glimmer，它可以本地在笔记本电脑上运行，而无需依赖数据中心的计算能力。

该模型是开放权重的，这意味着其参数可以在本地进行调整，使开发人员能够围绕该模型创建自己的定制产品。

沉迷 Meta

在 29 个州指控 Meta 将其平台设计成令儿童上瘾后，一场联邦审判随即展开。在此之前，新墨西哥州的一位法官裁定，该公司在 5 月被判定对儿童造成伤害并被要求支付 3.75 亿美元之后，必须额外支付 5.67 亿美元。这笔额外资金的大部分将用于青少年的治疗服务。法官的裁决认为 Meta 助长了心理健康危机，并将该公司描述为“公共滋扰”。Meta 将对此决定提出上诉。

在长期持续的领导权之争中，Natarajan Chandrasekaran 宣布将卸任 Tata Sons 主席，这一消息令市场感到意外。Chandrasekaran 与 Tata Trusts 产生了分歧，后者是由商业王朝后裔 Noel Tata 领导的慈善团体，控制着这家印度企业集团。Mr Chandra-

Chandrasekaran 潜在的再次任命为主席可能会在即将举行的年度会议上受到质疑。

美国 7 月份在过去 12 个月中的消费者价格指数上涨了 3.4%，年化通货膨胀率略低于 6 月的 3.5%。剔除食品和能源的核心通胀率下降至 2.5%。与此同时，美国雇主在 7 月出人意料地削减了 23,000 个就业岗位，且 5 月和 6 月记录的就业增长被下调。

英国 GDP 在第二季度同比增长 1.2%。英国国家统计局表示，由于球迷涌向酒吧和户外活动，世界杯和良好的天气可能在 6 月提振了经济。经济在 5 月处于停滞状态。

通过 巴拿马运河 的船只所支付的价格创下新高。自伊朗战争爆发以来，费用大幅飙升，但最近的上涨与供应运河最繁忙船闸的湖泊水位下降有关。这意味着船只穿越水道的吃水深度降低，因此必须携带更少的货物。结果导致船只排队时间延长，

随着船只试图通过提高出价来插队使用运河，竞价价格随之上升。

中国航运公司 Sea Legend 开始提供首条使用北极航道（沿俄罗斯海岸通过北极）的定期服务。该服务在宁波（中国东海岸）和英国费利克斯托（Felixstowe）之间运行，在冰情允许的情况下于夏季和初秋运行。这条被誉为“冰上丝绸之路”的航线被中国寄予厚望，希望其能成为传统航线的实用替代方案。

零工经济的转型

纽约市市长 Zohran Mamdani 宣布支持市议会的一项措施，该措施实际上将强制亚马逊和其他企业雇佣配送司机，而非依赖承包商。市长办公室将目前的制度描述为“剥削性的”。亚马逊则反驳称，这将推高消费者的成本。澳大利亚的零工劳动者收到了一些好消息，该国国家职场法庭命令食品和杂货配送员每小时至少获得 31.30 澳元（22 美元）的报酬，比最低工资高出 5 澳元。

《经济学人》

社论 7

如何应对塔利班

阿富汗政权极其卑劣。但民主国家仍应与其接触

五年前，乔·拜登总统将美国军队撤出阿富汗。他并非被迫如此。美国本可以无限期地捍卫阿富汗那个虽有缺陷但经民主选举产生的政府，但选择了不这样做。选民们已经厌倦了美国最长的一场战争——这场战争的对手是控制了大部分农村地区的民兵组织塔利班。唐纳德·特朗普设定了撤军时间表，而拜登先生则将其彻底执行。

美国即将撤离的消息促使每一个持有枪支的阿富汗人重新评估谁更有可能赢得这个国家的内战。军阀们倒戈；政府士兵弃岗消失。政府几乎立即垮台。塔利班在几乎没有抵抗的情况下夺取了政权。绝望的平民在逃离新统治者时，死死抓住一架起飞的美国飞机的起落架，随后坠地身亡。

塔利班（其名称意为“宗教学生”）曾在1996年首次夺权，并强加了一种伊斯兰主义与前现代部落习俗的残酷结合，禁止女孩受教育，并用石块将同性恋者活活砸死。在塔利班接纳了在2001年9月利用劫持飞机袭击美国的恐怖组织基地组织（al-Qaeda）后，美国及其盟友将其推翻。但随后，塔利班战士对美国引入的民主制度发动了游击战，谋杀了法官、警察以及任何被视为协作人员的人。当拜登先生放弃时，一项持续二十年的国家建设努力在屈辱中结束。其他大国由此得出了关于美国是否愿意支持其盟友的结论。六个月后，弗拉基米尔·普京入侵了乌克兰。

五年过去了，美国在很大程度上已经忘记了阿富汗。这是一个错误。如果被忽视，这个国家更有可能再次引发地缘政治麻烦。其人民将遭受更深重的苦难。而且，它更有可能落入中国或俄罗斯的轨道。

正如本周我们的记者在对该国进行一次1,000公里的公路旅行后所报道的，塔利班牢牢掌控局面，除了与邻国巴基斯坦之间断断续续的冲突外，该地基本平静。但这是一种阴森的稳定（见简报）。

音乐被禁止。武装人员统治街道。禁令执行警察（vice-and-virtue police）对“罪人”实施殴打，例如胡须长度不足的男性。女性被禁止进入工作场所、大学，且在没有男性监护人的情况下禁止旅行。女孩被禁止就读中学，且由于童婚现已合法，许多女孩被直接从教室赶入婚姻。这一切让阿富汗人变得多么贫穷、病弱和悲哀，很难量化；因为数据收集并非塔利班的优先事项。

大多数阿富汗人渴望更多的自由。甚至许多塔利班成员在流亡多年后，也不再相信如果女孩学会拼写，天就会塌下来。但强硬派已残酷地确立了控制权。塔利班的埃米尔海巴图拉·阿洪扎达（Haibatullah Akhundzada）招募了一支忠诚的禁卫军，并攫取了利润丰厚的矿业合同。较为温和的塔利班成员通常太弱小或太恐惧，不敢挑战他。少数敢于挑战的人中，有些人不得不逃亡。

美国和欧洲试图孤立塔利班政权，拒绝承认其合法性，冻结阿富汗在海外持有的央行储备，并对官员实施制裁。但这几乎没有取得任何成效。塔利班强硬派并不在意西方外交官和投资者的远离，也不会仅仅为了拿到前政府的资产而调整其意识形态。因此，西方国家必须尝试新方法。

这意味着必须承认一些残酷的事实。首先，塔利班不会离开。其次，如果西方不与他们接触，其他大国将会这样做。俄罗斯已正式承认他们。中国、印度、土耳其和阿拉伯联合酋长国在矿业和贸易等问题上与他们合作。塔利班威胁要破坏印度和巴基斯坦的关系，因为后者担心德里与喀布尔之间更紧密的联系会使其陷入敌人的夹击之中。

西方采取更强硬手段的迹象已开始显现。欧洲人依然声称阿富汗政权不可接受，但他们在6月却邀请塔利班官员前往布鲁塞尔，讨论移民流动和遣返申请庇护失败者的问题。美国则在打击更为极端的伊斯兰主义团体的斗争中，悄悄与他们共享情报。

其他形式的接触也将具有意义。现在解冻在瑞士的$4.2bn阿富汗央行储备金还为时过早，因为这笔资金肯定会被用来支撑那个令人厌恶的埃米尔。但捐助者应停止削减人道主义援助，

自2022年以来，这类援助已下降了约70%。据一项估计，近一半的人口需要这些援助。此外，让联合国机构留在当地也很有用，他们可以作为眼睛和耳朵，就即将到来的饥荒、动荡或援助被盗发出预警。

第二步应该是制裁改革。许多在几十年前被列为恐怖分子的塔利班高层，现在已成为部长。这产生了一个意想不到的效果，即使该国被排除在全球金融体系之外，并使其缺乏私人投资。西方公司担心在阿富汗开展任何形式的业务，以免触犯恐怖主义融资规则。改变这一点可以促进增长，最终可能会缓解威胁该国长期稳定的严重失业问题。

通往喀布尔的电报

一个更具争议的步骤将是外交承认。这并不意味着认可。体面的政府承认许多他们所鄙视的政权。相反，这意味着接受这样一个现实：在可预见的未来，塔利班很可能将继续统治阿富汗。拒绝建立外交关系并不是什么有力的筹码——塔利班并不认为他们的合法性取决于异教徒的认可。然而，运作中的大使馆可以监测恐怖主义威胁，并建立有用的沟通渠道，随着时间的推移，这可能会鼓励该政权中较为温和的派系。

不要误会。这个卑劣政府的改革必须主要来自内部，而且可能需要数十年的时间。但审慎的接触可能利大于弊。因此，现在是美国和其他民主国家捂住鼻子，与塔利班进行对话的时候了。■

8 位领导人

美国的方式

美国恢复委内瑞拉民主的努力取得了出人意料的良好开端

当唐纳德·特朗普总统在1月派遣美国特种部队抓捕委内瑞拉独裁者尼古拉斯·马杜罗时，听起来恢复民主并非他的首要任务。他没完没了地吹嘘自己现在如何掌控委内瑞拉的石油，却几乎不提及该国的政治未来。他任命被废黜的暴政之下的糟糕副手德尔西·罗德里格斯为临时总统。许多人担心，如果没有美国对民主转型的坚定承诺，旧有的、残暴的盗贼统治将会延续。

然而，委内瑞拉民主的前景似乎正在改善。这并不是因为特朗普先生突然对这个话题产生了热情，而是因为他的国务卿马可·鲁比奥——一个真正关心结束拉丁美洲左翼独裁统治的人——被授予了相当大的自由裁量权，可以利用美国巨大的影响力来追求这一目标。

委内瑞拉政权与反对派人士之间的一轮首轮谈判于8月12日结束，双方达成了一项初步协议，将启动司法改革进程，包括对最高法院的改革。我们的报道发现了乐观的理由（见美国板块）。进一步的谈判可能会在12月前产生能够实现公平选举的改革方案。

如果没有来自美国的压力，这一切都不会发生。鲁比奥先生深度参与其中，直接与反对派首席谈判代表迪诺拉·菲格拉（Dinorah Figuera）沟通。她的团队在加拉加斯乘坐美国汽车，由美国安保人员护卫，并住在美国指定的酒店里。

在马杜罗先生统治下，委内瑞拉人的自由和经济双双萎缩，绝大多数委内瑞拉人都渴望民主转型能够成功。这对特朗普先生也将有利。他希望看到委内瑞拉破旧的油田重新繁荣；只有在民主和法治之下，该国才能足够稳定，以吸引必要的投资。

然而，问题依然很多。统治集团经常违背允许公平选举的承诺。由鲁比奥先生指导的反对派将被指责为美国的傀儡。而且，许多遭受地震打击的普通委内瑞拉人尚未从美国控制的石油收入中获得多少实惠，这并无益处。如果谈判拖延，政权将有更多机会逃避其承诺，而反对派可能会被削弱。

因此，速度至关重要。美国应坚持要求委内瑞拉在2027年举行总统选举。这段时间绰绰有余；在柏林墙倒塌后，几个前苏联附庸国在一年内就组织了自由选举。与此同时，美国必须披露其收缴了多少石油资金，其中多少已返还给委内瑞拉，以及哪些制裁阻碍了资金拨付。当选政府从就职第一天起就应全面掌控石油收入。

反对派领导人玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多（María Corina Machado）也必须被允许迅速回国。鲁比奥先生可能希望让她远离谈判桌，以便更容易与政权对话，但让她流亡在外的做法是短视的。政权需要确信，任何协议也将约束马查多女士，即使她是通过代理人进行谈判，因为她很有可能成为委内瑞拉的下一任总统。否则，她可能会否认协议中的可能条款，例如为政权人物提供安全的流亡（尽管她坚持自己并非为了复仇）。

马查多女士在委内瑞拉的出现还将有助于缓解另一个担忧：特朗普先生的反复无常。他曾谈到要将委内瑞拉变成第51个州，有时还暗示其石油财富属于美国。目前，他允许鲁比奥先生追求更崇高的目标。如果他改变主意，唯一可能拯救委内瑞拉民主的，就是马查多女士号召大规模人群走上街头的能力。■

惩罚普京

错误的武器

赋予唐纳德·特朗普新的关税权力绝非帮助乌克兰之举

弗拉基米尔·普京在认为继续作战的成本超过停止作战的成本之前，不会结束他对乌克兰的战争。也就是说，是指对他而言的成本——这位俄罗斯总统完全不在意他所摧毁的乌克兰人的生命，对他为了追求某种扭曲的个人荣耀而浪费的所有俄罗斯血汗和财富也几乎毫无在心。因此，乌克兰及其支持者必须设法让他相信，他永远无法获胜，且继续尝试只会削弱他自己。

8月7日，美国参议院通过了一项旨在传递这一信息的法案。这项名为《林赛·O·格雷厄姆制裁俄罗斯和伊朗法案》的法案是以一位直到7月去世前一直坚定支持乌克兰的参议员命名的，该法案指示美国总统对俄罗斯采取更强有力的行动。正如其标题所示，法案包括对普京和其他俄罗斯高官，以及对俄罗斯能源项目和金融机构实施的新制裁。其目的是在俄罗斯未能与乌克兰达成和平协议期间对其进行惩罚，并发出信号，表明美国不会抛弃普京那些勇敢的受害者。

该法案以 86 比 11 的大幅数额获得参议员批准，是在一个充满敌意的分裂国家中罕见的跨党派合作案例。不幸的是，其目前的版本存在严重缺陷。

主要的担忧在于，它赋予了美国总统新的 ▶

领导者 9

▶ 征收关税的权力（见美国部分）。对于俄罗斯能源的前五大进口国以及任何帮助俄罗斯规避制裁的国家，可能会被课以高达 100% 的关税。如果总统认为符合“美国的国家利益”，可以豁免关税；或者如果某个国家在增加或减少俄罗斯石油或天然气的进口或转移方面采取了“重大步骤”，总统可以调整关税。国会将如此大的自由裁量权交给任何人都是过于宽泛的，更不用说交给唐纳德·特朗普了。

其逻辑大致如下：制裁似乎并未改善普京的行为。鉴于存在规模庞大且难以监管、非法运输这些物资的油轮“影子舰队”，封锁俄罗斯石油出口非常困难。因此，已故的格雷厄姆参议员和共同发起该法案的民主党人理查德·布卢门撒尔引入了一种新武器：对购买俄罗斯碳氢化合物的国家征收关税。

危险在于，特朗普可能会创造性地解读“国家利益”条款。他有此前例。最高法院在2月份驳回了他之前的主张，即宣布经济“紧急状态”（在本例中指美国的贸易逆差）允许他根据自己的意愿征收关税。这种幻想般的法律理论曾使特朗普能够威胁要打击任何令他不满的国家——这是为美国以及他个人榨取让步的一种便捷手段。自从大法官们挫败了这次权力攫取后，特朗普一直试图在其他一系列法律理由的掩护下重新实施关税，但成败参半。

新法案可能会将最高法院正确地剥夺的一部分权力重新还给总统。这将对美国消费者不利，因为他们可能面临更高的价格。而对于全球贸易体系来说，情况会更糟，因为它将再次受制于特朗普自封的“关税人”。按照目前的草案，除非特朗普明智地选择不发动贸易战，否则该法案将引发与印度爆发新贸易战的阴影。该立法现在必须通过众议院，而众议院应当删除有关关税的部分。

导弹与信函

与此同时，华盛顿还可以采取其他更精明的步骤来帮助乌克兰。其中一项是实际的。由于缺乏美国制造的“爱国者”拦截弹将俄罗斯导弹从空中击落，乌克兰正艰难地抵御致命的导弹齐射。由于在特朗普先生对伊朗的战争中消耗了大量拦截弹，美国的库存所剩无几。但华盛顿可以同意将这些拦截弹的生产许可授予乌克兰，从而允许乌克兰加强自身的防御。

另一种帮助乌克兰的方式则不那么具体。需要让普京先生相信，美国和欧洲绝不会让乌克兰战败。考虑到特朗普先生在战争问题上极其矛盾的立场，以及他显然希望获得普京先生的好感，这很难实现。但国会将在特朗普先生离开白宫后继续存在很长时间，因此可以发出有用的信号。国会能为支持乌克兰聚集的多数票越多，普京先生就越快意识到是时候止损了。■

石油酋长 vs 中国

中国已从石油输出国组织（OPEC）手中夺取了石油市场的控制权

伊朗战争带来的最大经济意外是，即便在霍尔木兹海峡大部分被关闭的情况下，油价仍保持在相对克制的水平。战争爆发五个月后，布伦特原油价格仍比 4 月 30 日触及的 $126 美元 / 桶的盘中高点低约 $40；一度甚至出现了原油的“微型过剩”。因此，驾驶员和石油进口商尚未面临严重的危机。而且——尽管这似乎难以置信——伊朗对唐纳德·特朗普总统的影响力比它原本可能拥有的要小。对于这一喘息之机，世界应当感谢中国。

当伊朗开始将无人机和导弹指向穿越海峡的油轮时，每日 1400 万桶（b / d）的原油——约占全球产量的五分之一——面临被困在海湾中的风险。沙特阿拉伯和阿拉伯联合酋长国（UAE）很快通过管道分流了约 5m b / d。包括美国和日本在内的富裕国家通过释放战略储备覆盖了另一部分。但最大的缓冲器是中国原油进口量的近半数削减，降至 5.5m b / d。削减中国的进口量是一项国家工程的壮举，是通过释放库存、限制出口和管理需求实现的（见“金融与经济”板块）。

当中国的专制统治者如此牢牢掌控任何一个市场时，情况令人担忧。他们经常利用自己在全球经济中的杠杆——从成为最大的大麦进口国到精炼比任何人都多的稀土元素——来欺凌批评者，并给那些令他们不快的人施加代价。然而，伊朗战争表明，当大买家行使市场权力时，石油消费者可以从中受益。

几十年来，石油市场的王者一直是石油输出国组织（OPEC）。在战争之前，该卡特尔与其包括俄罗斯在内的盟友共同控制了全球约一半的原油产量。OPEC 通常旨在通过商定限制性的生产配额来人为地维持高价，经常协调减产（尽管偶尔它会反其道而行之，允许沙特阿拉伯向市场倾销以试图击垮竞争对手，尤其是美国的页岩油）。该卡特尔对市场的操纵就像是对全球经济征收的一种税。据估计，其造成的经济损失从相当温和到 1970 年至 2014 年间的 $5.7trn（或每年全球 GDP 的 0.15%）不等。

相比之下，中国的石油战略在今年被证明是有益的。它在价格低迷时积累的大量库存，在当时可能给全球经济带来了一点成本。但抑制价格飙升则相应地带来了好处。如果中国最终能平抑价格的峰值和谷值，可能会使新供应源的投资规划变得更容易。任何投机者都知道，试图低买高卖可能会出错。庆幸的是，承担这一风险以及存储成本的是中国。

石油市场的权力平衡可能会再次转移。在一段时间内，一旦海湾危机缓解，可能会出现原油的“超级过剩”，这原本是预测在 2026. 年发生的。OPEC 也会比战前更加虚弱。曾是其第三大生产国的阿拉伯联合酋长国（UAE）已于 5 月退出该卡特尔，其他成员也渴望增加产量。

10 Leaders

一门微妙的生意

然而，随着时间的推移，石油供应的萎缩速度可能会快于需求的下降，而中国在影响后者方面的作用可能会削弱。每隔两年，随着油田的枯竭，全球就会损失掉相当于一个沙特阿拉伯规模的原油供应量。在全球层面，2030年之后的投资不足以填补这些原油缺口。这可能会将权力天平重新向该卡特尔倾斜，因为海湾地区的国有巨头是少数仍在投资雄心勃勃的新项目的企业之一。其供应份额将会上升。与此同时，由于中国经济电气化的推进，其需求可能会下降。中国可能会判定其需要的储备量减少。如果真是这样，它在供应过剩期间的购买量将减少，在危机期间削减的进口量也将减少，这意味着它将不再吸收那么多的油价冲击。

中国出于纯粹的自利，使石油市场免受伊朗战争的影响。其出口管制导致柴油、汽油和煤油的供应量远低于在当前原油价格水平下通常应有的水平。它还对库存信息保持低调，因此美国和其他国家不知道它能承受制裁或战争多久。这使得石油市场更难以预测。

但其干预措施带来的后果为其他石油进口国赢得了时间。这些国家应当利用这段时间来实现供应来源的多样化并降低石油消费。他们避免依赖任何独裁政权最简单的方法，就是从根本上减少对这种“黑色液体”的需求。■

筛选成功

赞美“准定制”婴儿

夫妇双方应被允许基于疾病抗性和智商来筛选胚胎

在改变了人类生活之后，硅谷现在将目光投向了出生。一批初创公司提供筛选服务，允许通过体外受精（IVF）生育子女的夫妇根据胚胎患乳腺癌和糖尿病等疾病的遗传风险进行评估。有些公司则进一步涉足科幻领域，为智商、身高，甚至眼睛和头发的颜色提供评分（见“商业”板块）。

批评者对此感到沮丧。一些人担心公司正将不成熟的技术强推给脆弱的夫妇。另一些人则认为，即便技术可行，其使用也是不道德的。这两种论点都包含部分事实，但最终都缺乏说服力。禁止或严厉限制胚胎筛选将是一个错误。

目前，这场辩论还只是一个小众关注点。这些初创公司主要服务于富人、名人以及古怪之人。但这种情况将会改变。一波投资浪潮意味着体外受精的成本可能会下降。如果同时提供胚胎筛选，许多夫妇会选择接受。一项调查显示，四分之三的美国人支持对胚胎进行疾病筛选；约三分之一的人对非疾病特征持相同态度。而这还是在竞争压力尚未产生之前。谁愿意看到自己的孩子在遗传筛选过的同学面前处于劣势？

许多医学专家——包括发达国家几乎所有的遗传学和生殖医学团体——质疑这种“多基因”预测是否已准备好面向消费者。在生育监管比美国更严格的英国，基于未经批准的因素选择胚胎是违法的。

确实有理由保持谨慎。多基因评分非常复杂。对于许多由单个基因引起的疾病，检测可以提供近乎确定的结果：如果胚胎携带相关物质，它就会患上该病。然而，对多个基因的评估得出的则是风险评估，而非二元答案——而且此类评估对于具有欧洲血统的人群更为准确，因为他们在遗传数据库中的代表性更高。

此外还需要注意其他限制。风险的降低在相对 terms 上可能看起来很大，但在绝对 terms 上可能很小，尤其是对于罕见病。筛选某些特征可能会增加其他不理想特征的风险。即使对于像身高这样由遗传高度决定的特征，父母仍受限于其自身胚胎中出现的范围。

然而，这些事实是支持信息披露的理由，而非支持法律限制或全面禁止。如果公司想要提供多基因评分，它们必须充分沟通该技术的局限性和风险。它们还应允许其测试接受独立审查。这不会毁掉一个初创业务，因为这些初创公司并非像某些批评者指责的那样在推销“江湖骗术”。2019年的一项研究发现，在十个胚胎中进行选择的父母，可能使其孩子的身高增加1-6厘米，智商增加1到7分——而该技术现在已有近十年历史。随着遗传数据库的完善并覆盖更广泛的人群，以及人工智能挖掘出基因与特征之间的关系，评分将会提高。

这种进步将引发困难的伦理问题。一些人，包括“让美国再次健康”运动，认为生育技术破坏了本应是自然的过程。另一些人则担心，如果多基因筛选仅限于富人，他们的后代将拥有另一种不公平的优势。最令人恐惧的批评是，这些生育领域的创业者是本世纪的优生学家。

但这些论点都经不起推敲。“非自然”技术早已被应用于许多现代分娩中：这种反对胚胎筛选的论点同样可以轻易地应用于体外受精（IVF）等技术，而只有极端主义者才希望禁止后者。成本应当会下降，从而使筛选技术变得更加普及。而且，20世纪初优生学计划那种杀戮式的强迫，与父母在挑选胚胎时寻求尽可能多地获取信息之间，有着巨大的区别。

那些渴望拥有聪明孩子的夫妇，或许更好的建议是关注出生后发生的事情。然而，只要父母明白并不存在所谓的“完美婴儿”，国家就不应阻碍他们获取更多一点的信息。■

执行焦点（EXECUTIVE FOCUS）

11

计划新的职业挑战？

获取机密机会的独特渠道

InterExec 是协助年薪 $250k 及以上的高级管理人员进行下一次职业跳槽的全球领导者。

我们拥有近 50 年的经验，能够谨慎地利用我们与全球 15,000 名猎头高管的关系，为客户最大限度地提升职业前景。

无论您的下一个挑战是什么，我们为您提供一次免费的、共同探索性的初步会面，以确定我们是否能提供帮助。

london@interexec.net www.interexec.net +44 (0)20 7256 5085

成立于 1976 年

Inter Exec

独特网络 ♦ 卓越人才

img-23.jpeg

-24.

12

房产

August

-25.

在欧洲生活。四处可居之所。

August 在欧洲最受推崇的地方打造由设计精美的住宅组成的私人收藏——每处住宅都得到全面维护，并在一个经过精心挑选的小型家庭圈中共享。其最新推出的是 Prime Collection：四处位于法国南部、托斯卡纳、法国阿尔卑斯山和马略卡岛的稀有住宅。

询问任何热爱欧洲的人想住在哪里，答案很少是一个单一的地方。在普罗旺斯度过一个季节。在托斯卡纳度过秋天。在阿尔卑斯山迎接第一场雪。在夏天离去后的地中海岛屿上停留。几代人以来，想要拥有这一切意味着必须在海外买房，并承担远程维护房屋所带来的一切麻烦。

-26.

August 的创立旨在让这种愉悦在没有负担的情况下成为可能。它在欧洲最受推崇的地方策划由设计精美的住宅组成的私人收藏。您拥有一个收藏系列的份额——随之而来的是，您拥有全部四处住宅，而不仅仅是一处。这是真正的所有权，且每处住宅的选址、修复、布置和维护完全由 August 负责。您只需抵达；其他一切都已安排妥当。大多数家庭每年在这些住宅中度过 8 到 12 周。

房产

13

Prime Collection

-27.

Prime 是这一理念最充分的体现，也是最新的系列：一个由四处非公开市场房源组成的私人收藏，分别位于法国南部、托斯卡纳、法国阿尔卑斯山和马略卡岛，仅由 16 个家庭共享。每处住宅可接待最多 10 位客人，设有宽敞的聚会房间、健康设施以及融入周围景观的私人场地。一个家庭不再只有一处海外房产，而是拥有四处——以及它们之间涵盖的整个欧洲。

该系列以其四处住宅中的第一处拉开序幕：一座位于穆然（Mougins）上方、戛纳后山丘陵地带的别墅。3,200 平方英尺的面积内设有五间卧室，其中两间为主卧套房，此外还设有健身房、户外厨房、盐水泳池、法式滚球场（pétanque court）以及专为漫长午餐设计的有顶露台。其内部装饰采用石灰岩、手工陶瓷和法国藤编，感觉与普罗旺斯融为一体。距离尼斯蔚蓝海岸机场 25 分钟车程。

随后的三处住宅秉承同样的精神选址。一座位于基安蒂（Chianti）葡萄园中的传统别墅，配有自己的酒窖。一座位于梅热夫（Megève）的当代山地小屋，可体验阿尔卑斯山的每个季节。以及一座位于马略卡岛卡斯孔科斯（Cas Concos）上方的僻静庄园（finca），可俯瞰山谷的日落景色。

“这些是家庭会世代回归的家，”August 的联合创始人兼首席执行官 Mèlie Dunod 表示，“设计精美，根植于周围环境，旨在成为一个家庭故事的一部分。”

这些是家族世代回归的家园

Prime 是 August 旗下多个系列中的最新成员，每个系列都适用于在欧洲度过时光的不同方式。Grand Pied à Terre 系列提供位于伦敦、巴黎、罗马、巴塞罗那和戛纳等大城市中心的优雅公寓；而 Premium 和 Signature 系列则位于乡村，更贴近自然景观。无论家庭选择哪一个，原则始终如一：一座美丽的家园，得到全方位的照料，在您抵达的那一刻即刻就绪。

拥有在欧洲置业的所有乐趣，而无需承担通常随之而来的责任——抵达一座为您准备就绪的家园。

在 augustcollections.com 探索这些系列

探索系列

@august.collections

14

信函：空调、医疗事故、夜间经济、安迪·伯纳姆的音乐品味、汉堡

城市热浪

那些推动在欧洲等地安装更多空调的人没有意识到，空调是城市热岛效应的主要原因之一（见 7 月 25 日 “空调的地缘政治”）。研究表明，在巴黎（那里大多数居民仍没有空调）的热浪期间运行空调，会导致城市环境温度升高 2℃ (3.6°F)。如果将空调作为城市的主导冷却策略，将使城市陷入更悲惨的夏天，损害户外工作者、运动员、游客以及任何不在空调空间内的人。

一个更明智的替代方案正在包括亚特兰大、波士顿和达拉斯在内的十几个美国城市被采用，即通过改变表面材质来实现一定的冷却效果。城市屋顶和道路吸收了 80% 以上的入射阳光，对城市热量的贡献是全球变暖的三倍。解决方案是将所有城市表面视为一个统一的综合散热方案。在我们的帮助下，亚特兰大去年通过了一项法案，要求新建筑和改造后的屋顶必须具有更高的反射率。这项措施（该市采取的几项措施之一）将使商业屋顶的反射率提高三倍，使城市温度降低 1.3℃（在炎热的低收入社区降温可达 3.5℃），并减少 3.1亿美元 的电费。实施这些强制要求对城市而言无需成本，且由于反射屋顶的成本与深色屋顶大致相同，企业和消费者也能从中获益。

格雷格·卡茨 (GREG KATS) 首席执行官 智能表面联盟 (Smart Surfaces Coalition) 华盛顿特区

如果没有空调的引入，美国阳光地带（Sunbelt）将不会如此繁荣。我在 20 世纪 50 年代的密西西比州长大，那里的夏天极其闷热潮湿。如果没有空调，像亚特兰大、夏洛特、休斯顿和菲尼克斯这样的城市将无法繁荣。如果没有空调，从北方的蓝色州向南方的红色州迁移的现象也不会发生。 詹姆斯·霍顿 (JAMES HORTON) 北卡罗来纳州，夏洛特

探寻真相

您关于英国产科医院死亡事件和掩盖行为的文章揭示了一个关键的悖论，但未能得出其教训（见 7 月 4 日 “撒谎的医生”）。您提到，在 2014 年引入“坦诚义务”后，诺丁汉工作人员报告的中度伤害事件有所下降。因此，一项旨在引导诚实的行为反而导致了不诚实。

这并非特例，而是复杂系统中的一个可预测因素。当披露成为强制要求时，行为就会发生变化。当工作人员担心被指责、被起诉和受到制裁时，伤害的分类就成了

这个迷人的男人

安迪·伯纳姆对英国音乐的看法，既忽视了当今英国音乐创作的广度，也忽视了除 80 年代独立乐队这一熟知经典之外的英国音乐历史（见 8 月 1 日的“贝杰霍特”专栏）。他忽略了曼彻斯特以及英国丰富的黑人音乐遗产。与其重复提及 The Smiths 和 Oasis 等早已成名的名字，他或许应该认可 DJ Paulette、Hewan Clarke 和 A Guy Called Gerald 等人物，他们帮助塑造了曼彻斯特的舞曲和电子音乐文化，以及关于 Hacienda 音乐场馆那段更广泛、如今已被神话且经常被“洗白”的故事。总的来说，首相——

改变的是分类而非实践。安全取决于学习，而学习取决于对失误的诚实记录。只有在这些记录不会被用来攻击自己时，人们才会提供此类信息。这就是为什么卫生服务安全调查局（Health Services Safety Investigations Body）的调查具有法定“安全空间”，航空领域的类似机制也是如此。

您得出结论认为真相无法通过立法实现，腐败的领导者必须下台。对受害家庭负责确实是不容谈判的。但您列举的从莫克姆湾（Morecambe Bay）开始的每一次调查都除掉了领导者，却没有一次改变讲述真相的条件。在学习与执法正式分离之前，每一任新领导层都将继承同样的激励机制，关于患者安全失败的进一步报告将接踵而至。

泰德·贝克（TED BAKER） 主席 卫生服务安全调查局 伦敦

一个放松的夜晚

如果城市想要提振夜间经济，最好的办法是避免通过提供更多酒精许可证来“让派对变得更容易”（见 7 月 18 日的“夜班”一文）。

部长可以向伦敦的 Ezra Collective 等当代团体学习，他们的作品倡导包容与希望，而非庆祝那些陈旧的独立音乐赞歌。我们需要少一点《Wonderwall》，多一点《Where I'm Meant to Be》。 蒂姆·庞特（TIM PUNTER） 伦敦

酒精带来的高利润和税收确实诱人，但作为一名前警官，我知道更容易获得酒精的代价是沉重的：家庭暴力、醉驾、成瘾以及飙升的医疗成本。况且，证据表明年轻人正对传统的饮酒文化感到厌倦。

城市真正缺乏的是适合深夜交谈和放松的场所，例如咖啡馆、延长营业时间的图书馆和博物馆以及游戏休息室。人们想要一个可以与他人建立联系而没有饮酒压力的地方。充满活力的替代方案已经在中东的咖啡馆文化和东亚的夜市中兴起。巴黎举办面包店狂欢派对，柏林则有“清醒感官”（Sober Sensations）活动。

人们依然想要夜生活。他们只是不想在凌晨 4 点浑身呕吐物地踉跄回家。

查尔斯·霍尔茨克劳（CHARLES HOLTSCLAW） 休斯顿

美国有一个城市采用了您关于让人们寻找乐趣的处方：新奥尔良。正如鲍勃·迪伦曾说过的：“在新奥尔良，一切都是个好主意。” 莫里斯·兹威克（MORRIS ZWICK） 马里兰州杰曼敦

不要含糊其辞

巨无霸指数确实自然地引发了许多双关语（见 8 月 1 日的“汉堡经济学 40 年”）。虽然有些人可能对这种双关语颇有微词（beef），但对我来说，它们是该指数的“特制酱料”。让我们不要纠结于它们有多俗气（cheesy）；试图删除它们会让巨无霸指数陷入真正的困境（pickle）。事实上，如果不允许记者在文章中铺设像洋葱一样层层叠叠的双关语，那将是非常令人头疼（pain in the bun）的。 保罗·施赖纳（PAUL SHRINER） 艾奥瓦州安肯伊

→ 信件请寄至编辑处：The Economist, The Adelphi Building, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N; 电子邮件：letters@economist.com。更多信件请见：economist.com / letters

--。

当你的女儿需要一名天使投资人，而你就是那个天使……

选择 Barclays Premier，抢占先机 提供全新且专属的个性化财务规划 以及专属顾问*

img-32.jpeg

*适用资格标准。投资产品和服务由 Barclays Bank plc 及其子公司提供。资本有风险。 通过 Bank UK PLC 向其客户提供银行和信贷产品。 Bank UK PLC 经审慎监管局（Prudential Regulation Authority）授权，并受英国金融行为监管局（FCA）和审慎监管局监管。在英格兰注册。注册号 9740322。注册地址：1 Churchill Place, London E14 5HP。

16

受邀撰文

特朗普政府关于改革美国科学体系的论据

img-33.jpeg

当第二次世界大战接近尾声时，富兰克林·D·罗斯福总统交给他的科学顾问瓦内瓦·布什一项任务：为战后秩序重新组织美国的科学事业。布什的答复是一份名为《科学：无尽的前沿》的报告，该报告成为了美国政府支持基础科学的蓝图。这进而促成了国家科学基金会（NSF）的成立——这是一个支持基础研究的联邦机构，并塑造了定义了大部分“美国世纪”的对科学技术充满信心且志在必得的态度。

政府应当支持基础研究、此类研究可以成为国家繁荣的基石，以及美国能够组织其科学机构以促进这一进程的信念，在今天依然像布什提出该方案时那样成立。但我认为，布什会首先意识到，开展科学研究的世界自1945年以来已经发生了剧烈变化，使得美国的研究体系需要进行更新。

布什在一个特殊的时刻向罗斯福提交了报告。当时，美国正处于人类历史上最大规模冲突的最终胜利边缘。上个世纪的科学强国——欧洲各国，大多已满目疮痍。这种结构性现实造就了美国制造业实力的巅峰。同样，这也解释了布什在和平时期能够延续战时组织科学模式的部分原因。1961年，德怀特·艾森豪威尔总统描述了布什倡议在冷战时期的顶峰。艾森豪威尔观察到，“研究已变得至关重要”，且变得“更加形式化、复杂且昂贵”，因为“实验室和测试现场的科学家特遣队”取代了“孤独的发明家”。大规模的工业科学很快动员了政府、企业和学术界，在奔向月球的竞赛中击败了苏联。

那个战后的工业美国已不复存在。而冷战后关于开放世界的梦想，已让位于一个竞争激烈的全球环境；在这个环境中，寻求在科学技术领导力竞赛中超越美国的，不再是苏联的科学，而是中国的技术能力。

除了历史的演进，还有其他理由认为《无尽的前沿》已经过时。近几十年来，美国的科学事业已显出老态，回报率在下降。

尽管生物医学研究预算自20世纪90年代以来飙升，但重大突破的频率有所放缓，药物审批也陷入停滞。许多科学家将近一半的时间花在文书工作上。这个系统服务于自身，而非服务于科学家。

布什的管理主义推动了后来被称为科学发展“线性模型”的模式，即政府资助大学的基础研究，而工业界将新发表的见解转化为新颖的应用。当政府是基础科学的主要管理机构时，这是有意义的。但如今，越来越多的科学家在工业界进行研究，且工业界资助的基础科学数量也在增加。在过去的二十年里，用于基础研究的私人资金份额增长了五倍。工业界自行资助的基础研究每年高达374亿美元，超过了政府在大学提供的资助。2024年诺贝尔化学奖授予的一项蛋白质折叠突破，很大程度上是通过工业界的资源和人才实现的。

此外，人工智能正在创造新的环境，研究机构必须对此做出适应。如果我们能将人工智能的能力与合适的研究生态系统相结合，它有可能成为人类历史上最强大的科学进步加速器。我们推迟调整的时间越长，那些基于布什蓝图构建的传统组织结构就越有可能被压垮。随着世界的变化，以及美国领导力所面临的挑战随之改变，组织国家研究系统的努力必须摆脱 20 世纪的管理主义。

为了应对这些新现实，政府正在重新调整重点，以便在最合适的时间和地点支持美国最顶尖的科学家开展其最佳工作。我们应当采取一种组合投资的资助方式，既包括快速的探索性资助，也包括长期支持，使时间线与研究人员的工作相匹配。我们应当利用完整的资助机制工具包，包括奖金挑战赛以及通过约束性承诺为创新产品创造市场。我们应当尝试能够促进颠覆性提案的评审流程，并资助新的机构模式，例如 X-Labs——这是美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的一项计划，旨在启动并规模化新的组织，以解决大学和工业实验室无法通过传统方法轻易解决的技术挑战。

除此以外，我们应当通过扩大可携带的研究生奖学金和四年制博士项目，来支持职业早期的独立研究。我们应当让我们的工作接受元科学（metascience，即对我们如何进行科学研究的科学研究）的审查，包括在资助机构中建立元科学部门。并且，我们应当秉持阿波罗计划的精神协调国家力量，为人工智能 era 准备科学生态系统。为此，唐纳德·特朗普总统于去年 11 月通过行政命令启动了“创世纪任务”（Genesis Mission）。

向瓦内瓦尔致敬

为了论证这一转型，上个月我向总统提交了一份关于美国科学事业形态的报告，题为《科学：一个新的黄金时代》。它是布什《无尽的前沿》的续篇，也是一次致敬，但同时也旨在成为其继承者。当前的时刻要求我们更新他的初衷，重新找回他的雄心与乐观，同时认清我们所处的新环境。■

迈克尔·克拉齐奥斯（Michael Kratsios）是白宫科技政策办公室主任。

17

简报 阿富汗

和平、贫困与压制

赫拉特、坎大哈与喀布尔

阿富汗比半个世纪以来的任何时候都安全得多。但其人民正遭受苦难，且日益被孤立

在喀布尔政府区中心的外交部路（foreign-ministry road）上，咖啡馆过去常播放阿富汗流行音乐，以吸引爱八卦的公务员群体。现在，那里不再传出音乐——其他任何地方也是如此。音乐已被禁止。男人穿着传统的shalwar kameez（宽腿裤套装）在街上匆匆走过，蓄着长胡须。曾经色彩斑斓的壁画现在变成了一句巨大的达里语（波斯语的当地方言）标语：“除真主外别无神灵”。在标语旁边，一名穿着黑色作战服的男子懒散地靠在缴获的美国悍马车炮塔上，抚摸着机枪，漫不经心地盯着午餐时间的车流。

8月15日将是塔利班重返喀布尔五周年。在之前的20年里，他们一直与政府、其美国支持者以及美国的一些盟友作战。这场战争始于2001年，当时美国推翻了塔利班的第一届政府，因为该政府为策划9月11日袭击的恐怖分子提供了庇护。到2021年战争结束时，它已成为美国历史上持续时间最长的战争。随着这个超级大国转身离去，美国支持的政权像纸牌屋一样崩塌。塔利班则在毫无阻碍的情况下回归。

从该国西部的赫拉特，到南部的坎大哈，再到东部的喀布尔，这段旅程展示了他们是如何巩固统治的。在1,000公里的行程中，本刊记者看到塔利班的黑白旗在城镇广场、麦田、环岛、偏远的检查站、大学教授的办公桌以及首席执行官的董事会会议室中飘扬。

厌倦了战争的阿富汗人欢迎和平。曾经充斥着自杀式炸弹爆炸声的城市现在感觉出奇地平静。“这是鸟类回到喀布尔的第二个夏天，”一名前政府官员指着花园里的树木说道。

这一观察表明，野生动物比国际舆论更容易适应新局面。尽管多个国家在喀布尔设有大使馆，但只有1个外国政府——俄罗斯——承认伊斯兰酋长国。塔利班控制着各部委、税收、边境和军队，但由于许多内阁成员仍被作为恐怖分子受到制裁，他们被排除在全球金融体系之外。他们对12岁以上女孩教育的荒唐禁令，进一步巩固了其被排斥者的地位。

塔利班建立了一种相当稳定的和平，并且运行现代国家的能力比20世纪90年代要好得多。那时，他们的领导人对该国南部普什图村庄之外的生活知之甚少。而现在，许多人已经见过了更广阔的世界，尤其是许多人在战争期间逗留过的海湾国家。

但他们没有办法吸引投资。而且，经济权和军事权正日益集中在酋长海巴图拉·阿孔扎达（Haibatullah Akhundzada）手中，他并非在相对国际化的喀布尔执政，而是在普什图城市

18 简报 阿富汗

► 坎大哈执政。即便按照塔利班的标准来看，他也极其极端。

在数十年战争之后获得稳定并非毫无意义。但阿孔扎达政府并没有为该国快速增长的4,500万人口——其中近三分之二在2001年尚未出生——提供任何哪怕稍微像样的一条通往繁荣的道路。其中许多人发现，他们在物质生活方面正变得更糟。所有人——尤其是女性——的自由都受到了限制（国内的人员在接受《经济学人》采访时，大多要求匿名）。他们不断在微小的自由与受罚的风险之间进行权衡。

塔利班政府拥有一定的资源。它保留了喀布尔大部分专业化的官僚机构，以及处理税务、边境和海关的计算机系统（尽管埃米尔在6月份禁止在政府办公室使用智能手机）。一些官员选择逃离，但并没有发生大规模清洗；据政府内部及周边人士透露，原共和国政府超过一半的公务员仍留任。专业知识的延续帮助央行维持了阿富汗尼的强度，并使通货膨胀处于可控状态。

你在这里没有权力！

根据世界银行的数据，该政府目前的年度税收及其他收入约为 40亿美元，比 2020. 增加了近 60%。这一增长源于提高关税和打击贪腐。一位曾任职于前政府且目前仍住在喀布尔的部长表示，前政府在后期已腐败到“由内而外地腐烂”。阿富汗人表示，当时作为日常生活一部分的低级别敲诈勒索现在已基本消失。

然而，收入的增长幅度小于援助的下降幅度。2020 年，人道主义和发展援助约为 40亿美元。当塔利班掌权时，对政府的援助骤减，但其中大部分损失被通过其他渠道增加的人道主义援助所抵消。而现在，这部分援助也被削减了。2025 年，该数额仅为 12亿美元；今年的数字将更低，且可能低得多。因此，该国的医院和诊所正面临资金短缺，因为政府削减了医疗和福利资金，以便将收入的一半全部用于安全支出。

执政五年后，据报道，塔利班部长们在私下表示，他们仍处于“控制状态”，这意味着安全至上。他们取得了成效。根据收集此类数据的南亚恐怖主义门户网站（South Asia Terrorism Portal）的数据（见图表），去年在恐怖袭击中丧生的平民不足 100 人。政府已经严厉打击了曾经令人恐惧的伊斯兰国呼罗珊省。基地组织已经缩减了其在

找出离任日期

阿富汗，恐怖袭击记录死亡人数*，单位：000

img-35.jpeg

国家。今年7月，反对派团体发起了一系列袭击，并声称杀死了20多名塔利班战士。这种抵抗可能会增加。但这些袭击规模较小，且很容易被平息。

在打击恐怖组织方面有一个显著的例外——至少巴基斯坦政府是这么说的。一个在阿富汗有据点的名为“巴基斯坦塔利班”的组织在巴基斯坦境内发动袭击。巴基斯坦指责塔利班政府庇护该组织，其空军已袭击了阿富汗境内的目标。巴基斯坦还关闭了两国之间的边境。这导致了阿富汗食品价格上涨，并切断了进入出口市场和接受医疗救治的通道。

在减少阿富汗暴力方面，塔利班拥有一个巨大的优势：他们不需要与曾经制造绝大多数暴力的塔利班作战。这种讽刺并没有削弱给普通民众带来的益处。阿富汗人很快就意识到了和平带来的改变：农民可以将商品运往市场；男孩（以及在允许的情况下，女孩）可以步行上学；长途开车探亲或游览国家不再是一个反常的选择。

然而，这种和平是以镇压为代价的。安全部队对任何公开的异议都会做出残酷的回应。在最近一次访问拥有大量塔吉克人和什叶派穆斯林人口的赫拉特时，一名政府部长将当地警察作为其他地区的榜样，据两名了解讨论情况的当地人透露。他所赞扬的模范工作是镇压6月份一场抗议活动，当时女性对禁风与美德警察的打击感到愤怒。许多抗议者遭到殴打，一名青少年被枪杀。

政府在持机关枪的人员身上节省的开支，似乎被投入到了公路和清真寺中。主要城市在很大程度上仍由两条车道、偶尔崎岖的道路连接。但在从坎大哈开往喀布尔的途中，你会看到一段段新铺的沥青路。根据法令，大约每70公里就会建造一座清真寺。

在喀布尔，道路正在拓宽，私人住宅建设正在增加，其中大部分是由海外侨民为留在国内的亲属出资。在其他地方，政府正在投资运河、天然气管道和太阳能公园，并颁发金、铜和锂的采矿许可证，主要集中在国家北部。外交部发言人阿卜杜勒·卡哈尔·巴尔希（Abdul Qahar Balkhi）表示，塔利班的愿景是将阿富汗变成一个“积极竞争的空间”。他及其同事认为，如果和平能够维持，阿富汗肯定会开始繁荣。

月亮背后，雨季之外

如果真是这样，那么它还有很长一段路要走。在塔利班掌权后，该国的人均 GDP 大幅下降。按购买力平价计算，目前仅为 $2,300，大致相当于 2000 年代中期的水平。只有少数几个主要处于冲突中的撒哈拉以南非洲国家情况更糟。许多阿富汗人处于饥饿状态。长期的干旱导致食物短缺；在喀布尔的水井旁排起了长队。“我们遇到的很多孩子仅靠面包和茶维持生活，”一名人数已减少的援助工作者表示。

在萨罗比（Sarobi），这是一个坐落在喀布尔东部山区散布村落中的泥砖小镇，当地人说他们的食物仅够维持生存。很多人为了生存而负债。“我们有了和平，但口袋里空空如也，”一名村庄长辈拉齐·汗（Razi Khan）说道。对于许多家庭来说，最紧迫的问题是缺乏工作。25 岁的哈桑（Hassan）曾是前政府军队的一名士兵，自塔利班重新掌权以来一直在寻找工作。他补充说，目前仅有的工作——比如在当地的一个太阳能项目上做苦力——需要经过塔利班指挥官的审核。

约 600 万阿富汗人（其中许多人身无分文）被强制从巴基斯坦和伊朗遣返回国，这使上述问题进一步恶化。“这给一个已经处于崩溃边缘的国家带来了巨大的资源压力，”联合国难民署（UNHCR）的阿拉法特·贾马尔（Arafat Jamal）表示。►

img-36.jpeg

Briefing Afghanistan 19

► 大多数被伊朗驱逐的人来自阿富汗北部的贫困村庄，多年来，这些村庄一直依靠跨境从事季节性采摘水果的工作生存。

尽管许多阿富汗人已经习惯了贫困和艰苦的条件，但有一个话题让他们表达出极大的失望：教育。在 2001 年至 2021 年间，入学率有所上升，尤其是在城市中。虽然远未普及——目前的识字率仅为 37%——但父母们已开始将男女孩子上学视为常态。

因此，塔利班禁止女孩接受中等教育的禁令遭到了绝大多数阿富汗人的反对——而且根据《经济学人》采访的许多人的说法，大多数塔利班成员也反对这一禁令。但他们中的大多数对此无能为力。不过，一些城市的当局为部分较富裕的人群提供了一种变通方案，即向 madrasas（宗教学校）发放许可证，允许其教育 12 岁以上的女孩以及男孩。

在喀布尔一座改建的三层房屋里，教室狭小且破旧，地毯上布满蛀孔，这样一家机构的校长说他正在教育 600 名女孩。标准费用为每月 1,000 阿富汗尼 ($15.20)（部分较贫困的家庭支付较少），女孩们每周六天，每天接受女性教师四小时的教学。女孩们穿着黑色的 abayas（长袍）和紫色的头巾。四名 16 岁和 17 岁的女孩在告诉记者她们能重返校园有多么开心时，都戴着新冠疫情期间那种口罩，因为女性必须遮住嘴部。

从技术上讲，整个项目是合规的。尽管如此，每个人说话都压低声音，仿佛谈论这件事——尤其是谈到这并非纯粹的伊斯兰教育这一事实——可能会让它消失。女孩们说，这所学校比她们在 2021 年之前就读的公立学校更好。她们很高兴能学习数学、科学、地理和英语（她们都能流利地说英语），同时也学习她们很感兴趣的伊斯兰研究。

因为他所做的那些可怕的事情 其中一名女孩迪瓦（Diwa）说，她很遗憾许多朋友负担不起学费。她们都表示，令她们沮丧的是，她们将不被允许充分利用目前所获得的这种不稳定的教育。“我们不想只是坐在家里抚养孩子，或者在伊斯兰学校当老师，”纳迪亚（Nadia）说，“那不是我们的梦想。”

梦想的最大扼杀者是那位身在坎大哈、被一些驻喀布尔外交官称为“奥兹国度魔法师”的男人。阿孔扎达（Mr Akhundzada）据信大约 60 岁，就目前所知，他并没有躲在帘子后面，但他极少在公开场合露面；最近的一张经证实的照片还是几十年前拍摄的。他曾是一名神职人员和沙里亚法官，在战争期间，他主张塔利班转向自杀式袭击，并因此允许他的一个儿子在 2017 年杀害他人。

阿孔扎达实施了一套极少有其他穆斯林会试图为其辩护的沙里亚法版本，其中包括严格的性别隔离、强硬的着装规范以及将女性从公共生活中抹除。他的广播演讲明确表示，他将女性权利以及任何人的非宗教教育视为撒旦的行径。“他认为外部世界基本上是被毒害的，正在将阿富汗人从沙里亚法和上帝的道路上带走，”一名驻喀布尔的外交人士表示，“他的观点基本上就是‘将其关闭’。”智库昆西研究所（Quincy Institute）的亚当·温斯坦（Adam Weinstein）认为，坎大哈派系

可能认为，更多的援助和外国投资只会加强其竞争对手的影响力。相反，严酷的法令与孤立则有助于明确并从而维持埃米尔的铁腕统治。

这些并非实现该目标的唯一手段。埃米尔确保了喀布尔的各部部长都设有直接向他汇报的副手。他直接领导身着白袍的“禁令与美德警察”，这是该政权社会和制度控制的主要机制。他绕过喀布尔的财政部，建立了对部分矿业收入的控制。而在过去的六个月里，他以与巴基斯坦关系紧张为由，在坎大哈组建了一支由 8,000 名战士组成的部队，该部队处于军队指挥链之外，带有浓厚的禁卫军色彩。

人们曾真诚地希望回归后的局面不会按照阿孔扎达的意愿发展。许多目前驻扎在喀布尔的温和派塔利班成员认为，第二个酋长国可以在不牺牲信仰的情况下，效仿他们在海湾地区看到的伊斯兰现代化光辉典范。一度有传闻称，一些不那么反动的人物——尤其是内政部长、一个强大派系领导人西拉杰丁·哈卡尼（Sirajuddin Haqqani）——将挑战埃米尔。而现在，不满的塔利班成员们选择了闭口不谈，或许是不确定能否获胜，或许是因为无论他们有什么顾虑，都次于维持权力。

因此，除了更加退步的政策和进一步的孤立，没有明显的替代方案。医疗保健状况显示了这种代价。塔利班坚持将男性和女性患者及医生分开，将女医生排挤出去，并阻止女性接受医学培训。结果在预料之中：女性面临严重的医疗匮乏。慈善机构国际难民组织（Refugees International）的一项调查发现，2026 年上半年赫拉特的孕产妇死亡率是前一年同期的五倍。

另一个指标是移民。一位整个学院都被清除了女性（且受过教育的妻子无法工作）的教授表示，退步的政策已经导致了严重的人才流失。除非政策改变，否则这种流失将会加速。“我们留下来是希望情况能好转，但很快我们将开始尝试离开，”这位教授说。尽管伊朗对阿富汗移民的态度已变得敌对，但许多阿富汗人仍试图穿越马尔戈（Margo）沙漠逃离。“Marg”在波斯语中意为死亡，而那里的地貌恰如其名。

但如果有些人离开了，大多数人则别无选择只能留下。一些塔利班成员仍然坚称情况随时间推移会缓解。但许多阿富汗人感到不耐烦。“已经五年了，”学生迪瓦（Diwa）说，“我们不想等待。” ■

img-37.jpeg

为什么，哦为什么我不能？

--。

学期时间

工作。

亚马逊员工可以在学校假期期间请假。

亚马逊

每年保证十周假期。 由带薪假期和无薪假期组成。适用相关条件。

21

英国

政治与商业

工党失宠

工党政府与企业界关系恶化，但在安迪·伯纳姆的领导下有机会重新开始

近期英国政坛最令人意外的“热恋”发生在大型企业与工党之间。在 2024 年大选之前，该党发起了一场被本报称为“烟熏三文鱼攻势”的行动，旨在向企业主保证，它已摒弃社会主义，并将把经济增长作为其“第一使命”来治理国家。它与不同行业进行了长期且详细的磋商，征求关于如何促进增长的建议。

该计划奏效了。企业们厌倦了软弱无能的保守党，被党魁基尔·斯塔默爵士及其未来的财政大臣瑞秋·里夫斯所吸引，对工党心驰神往。但这并未持久。三文鱼三明治先是变干，随后发霉。到今年 7 月基尔爵士和里夫斯女士离职时，从富时 100 指数公司的首席执行官到敢打敢拼的初创公司创始人，大多数企业领袖都对他们感到厌烦。

政府停止倾听企业的声音，对其课以重税，且未能实施许多承诺过的促增长改革。此前由里夫斯女士亲自负责的企业对接工作被外包给了公务员。财政部和其他经济部门的部长们继续与企业主频繁会面，但与会者表示，这些会议更多是“拍照机会”，而非实质性讨论。

→ 本节其他内容

  • 22 企业缺失的声音
  • 23 口音与权力
  • 23 提前释放囚犯
  • 24 让苏格兰人远离毒品
  • 24 苏格兰的 guga 政治
  • 26 手工艺奶酪制造者
  • — 贝杰霍特休假中

该党乐观激进的基调很快变得不和谐。大选后几周，基尔爵士在唐宁街 10 号花园发表的一篇演讲震惊了国际投资者，他在演讲中抱怨“情况在好转之前会变得更糟”。工党的首份预算案对企业征收了巨额增税，其中最令企业痛苦的是增加了雇主缴纳的国民保险缴款（一种工资税）。即使是那些没有受到太大直接冲击的人，也被这次公告所体现的摇摆不定的决策方式所困扰。

企业和消费者信心继续暴跌。削减繁文缛节和降低企业能源价格的承诺几乎没有兑现，尽管基尔爵士在改革规划规则和金融服务监管方面迈出了第一步。

企业领袖们希望，他的离职能提供一个重新开始的机会。不幸的是，前首相和前财政大臣并非工党与企业界关系不稳的唯一原因。亲商情绪在党内十分罕见：仅有 6% 的工党议员在进入下议院前从事商业或金融工作（相比之下，保守党议员这一比例为 31%），而 11% 的人曾在工会工作，39% 的人在进入议会前从事其他政治工作（见下页图表）。新内阁中没有一个人拥有显著的

22 英国

商业背景。2010 年至 2024 年间的保守党内阁通常充斥着商业人士，包括在里夫斯女士之前的六任财政大臣。

党内高层会访问拥有大量工业劳动力的工厂和建筑工地，但面对可能驱动增长的服务型企业时，似乎就没那么自在。党内亲商的少数派抱怨，同事们习惯性地采取一种带有旧经济色彩的“社团主义”方法。一名工党前工作人员描述了该党与企业之间存在“精神鸿沟”。一位企业老板抱怨道，“‘工会好，企业坏’是其中许多人从未思考过的信条。”这种缺乏理解的情况是双向的：企业领袖也经常误解政治（见专栏）。

伯纳姆先生担任大曼彻斯特市市长的记录表明，他深知与企业密切协作的重要性。房地产开发商 LandSec 的首席执行官马克·艾伦（Mark Allan）赞赏他的做法：鼓励私营部门向曼彻斯特市中心投入资金，同时利用公共资金投资于周边较为破旧的城镇。一名助手表示，首相将自己的政治身份视为“亲商的旧工党”。

然而，他的言论则不那么令人乐观。伯纳姆先生猛烈抨击“新自由主义”和私有化，且几乎没有迹象表明他意识到利润动机可以为整个社会带来益处。他早期的干预措施旨在通过价格上限或税收微调来降低家庭生活成本，而非通过供给侧改革来降低商品和服务的生产成本。

在就任首相后的两次演讲中，他没有提到“增长”或“企业”（基尔爵士在进入唐宁街10号后的第一个完整工作日发表的演讲中，共四次提到“增长”）。首相似乎与美国和欧盟的领导人相处融洽，但几乎没有谈及贸易政策。行业游说团体 TheCityUK 的负责人迈尔斯·塞利克（Miles Celic）警告称，“伯纳姆确实需要阐明他在吸引国际投资方面的立场。”首相正洽谈聘请前银行家、前保守党大臣吉姆·奥尼尔（Jim O’Neill）在唐宁街任职，但据《泰晤士报》报道，此事可能会因在财富税问题上的分歧而受阻。

看我的行动，而非我的言论

商业并非铁板一块。初创企业对官僚主义感到沮丧，但他们责怪的是公务员而非部长。银行则对工党给出的待遇感到悄悄欣慰。酒吧和餐厅正被其税收负担所困扰——但他们乐观地认为，考虑到自己在振兴商业街（这是安迪·伯纳姆公开宣称的目标之一）中所扮演的角色，他们将处于伯纳姆安抚企业名单的首位（事实上，酒吧已被承诺将获得较低的商业税单）。

许多人对安迪·伯纳姆的计划感到紧张。如果他按照自己的言论行事，商业界将遭受重创。但仍有理由抱有希望。少数几个被商业界视为通往唐宁街 10 号渠道的工党官员都被留任了。在去年被调离后重新担任商业部长的乔纳森·雷诺兹（Jonathan Reynolds），以及AI部长卡尼什卡·纳拉扬（Kanishka Narayan），都受到了与他们打过交道的人的尊重。两人都隶属于一个增强版的商业与贸易部，该部门吸收了此前独立的科学与技术职责。科技公司对这一变化感到不满，但将所有最大的增长杠杆置于同一屋檐下，可能有助于抵消财政部过于强势的权力。

基尔爵士曾以商业界喜爱的方式说话，但随后实施的政策往往令其厌恶。安迪·伯纳姆有机会反其道而行之：言论民粹，行动中道。■

商业游说

应当发声之时

英国商业界未能使其声音被听到

在政治方面，商业领袖有时过于天真。他们在最近一次大选前为工党欢呼，却未深思该党政策的影响，这是一个错误。例如，他们似乎认为《就业权利法案》（该法案为工人提供了更多针对雇主的保护）会被大幅削弱，尽管该法案对工党议员和工会至关重要。在关于新法细节的谈判中，政府和工会的代表对商业团体糟糕的谈判技巧感到震惊。

除了在政府新闻稿中提供一些平淡的引语外，老板们通常不敢参与政治。公共事务专家沮丧地表示，很难说服那些高知名度的领导者讨论有助于其公司的政策，因为他们担心如果不能如愿以偿，会显得很愚蠢。少数敢于发声的人——例如 Octopus Energy 的创始人格雷格·杰克逊（Greg Jackson），或酒吧连锁店 J D Wetherspoon 的蒂姆·马丁（Tim Martin）——可能会遭到同行的反感。

选民普遍认为，如果确实需要增税，对企业征税是可以接受的（尽管他们更热衷于打击富人）。企业需要向政治家解释，为什么这样做最终会通过提高价格和抑制增长，导致公众变得更穷。

大多数老板现在认为，是时候摆出勇敢的面孔，与安迪·伯纳姆的新团队搞好关系了。企业渴望避免像在基尔·斯塔默爵士（Sir Keir Starmer）时期那样被排除在外（见前文）。据游说团体英国商会（British Chambers of Commerce）的莉娜·莱维（Lena Levy）称，政府应该“从一开始就与企业合作，而不是在决定做出之后才合作”。他们还极力渴求前任政府承诺过但未能提供的稳定性：在政府执政不足一年时，基尔爵士就在一次很大程度上是不必要的内阁改组中，更换了商业部长、城市部长和AI部长。

而且，企业极力希望避免在新任财政大臣约翰·希利（John Healey）将于10月交付的预算案中再次遭到税收掠夺。甚至他的同僚部长们也承认，他们无法得知他将如何支付预计增加的国防开支。如果政府在回避大规模增税的同时，又躲避严肃的支出削减，企业将担心一场财政鞭笞，这将使动物精神（animal spirits）持续受限。更大胆地发声可能有助于降低这一风险。

背景调查

英国，国会议员进入议会前的职业，2024年

img-39.jpeg

*医生、牙医、建筑师、测量师和工程师 来源：R. Ford 等著，《2024年英国大选》

英国 23

欠缺积极的政治

口音与权力

“通用北方口音”已获得认可。通用埃塞克斯口音仍有很长的路要走

观看一段安迪·伯纳姆（Andy Burnham）被任命为首相后的讲话视频，并开启自动字幕，你可能会感到惊讶：其中一条字幕写道：“我刚刚从 Bookingham 宫回来。”这是一个具有里程碑意义的时刻：在有录音记录的时代，他的任何一位前任在发“Buckingham”这个词时，都没有让转录员将其记录为“Bookingham”。他也是第一个将“class”等词与“gas”押韵的人。伦敦大学学院（University College London）的杰夫·林赛（Geoff Lindsey）表示，简而言之，他听起来像个北方人，比任何一位曾在唐宁街10号就职的人都更像。

数百万英国人的说话方式与伯纳姆先生相似。他在利物浦附近长大，后来搬到曼彻斯特。他常被视为一个讨好者，但不可能讨好所有人，尤其是在两个竞争激烈的城市之间。2016年，他告诉曼彻斯特都会大学的语言学家罗布·德拉蒙德（Rob Drummond），他被指责在利物浦刻意强化斯考兹（Scouse）发音，而在曼彻斯特则刻意强化曼彻斯特元音。他将自己的口音称为“通用北方口音”。

并非每位首相都说着完美的标准发音（RP），即便排除掉苏格兰和威尔士籍首相。吉姆·卡拉汉（Jim Callaghan）在“worst”和“work”等词中的“r”发音出卖了他：他来自朴次茅斯，靠近英格兰西南部，那里有时会在元音后发“r”音。哈罗德·威尔逊（Harold Wilson）的约克郡根源也体现在他的口音中，尽管他不像伯纳姆先生那样容易被立即贴上北方人的标签。两位较近期的首相，托尼·布莱尔爵士（Sir Tony Blair）和利兹·特拉斯（Liz Truss），虽然在北方长大，但听起来不像。

19世纪的情况有所不同。1830年代和1840年代的首相罗伯特·皮尔（Robert Peel）以兰开夏口音著称。威廉·格莱斯顿（William Gladstone）出生在利物浦，父母是苏格兰人，据说他也带有西北部口音——尽管在英国首相的第一段录音中，他对托马斯·爱迪生的正式问候里这一点并不明显。但到了20世纪中叶，一种精致的标准发音（RP）在牛津剑桥、BBC和威斯敏斯特之间占据主导。

那种世纪中叶的口音现在听起来几乎有些滑稽，随着20世纪60年代工人阶级和地区口音在更广泛的文化中变得更酷，这种口音迅速消失。但在政治领域，变化较为缓慢。尤其是工党，开始炫耀其拥有工人阶级和地区口音的议员。但他们中没有人能进入唐宁街10号。

威斯敏斯特想要听起来像这个国家，空间仍在缓慢地打开。曼彻斯特附近利和阿瑟顿（Leigh and Atherton）的议员乔·普拉特（Jo Platt）在索尔福德长大。在20世纪80年代担任营销实习生时，为了避免像其他人那样被嘲笑，她改变了自己的口音；当她下班后给朋友打电话时，朋友们会问：“你为什么那样说话？”此后，她重新接纳了自己的旧口音，并引发了一场最近关于该话题的议会辩论。（一名北爱尔兰议员分享了他的经历：《议会记录》（Hansard）的工作人员追着他问他说了什么，以便记录在官方档案中。）

德拉蒙德博士和剑桥大学的阿曼达·科尔（Amanda Cole）启动了一项研究项目，以进一步了解威斯敏斯特的口音。科尔博士来自埃塞克斯，她的研究（使用她自己的声音）发现，人们认为一个带有埃塞克斯口音的说话者比标准发音（RP）的说话者聪明程度低11%。她说：“我认为这个国家还没有到可以让一位带有埃塞克斯口音的人担任首相的地步。” ■

提前释放囚犯

犯罪与惩罚

英国监狱的危急状态是对首相的第一次严峻考验

安德鲁·哈珀（Andrew Harper）是一名 28 岁的警员（PC），在 2019. 年殉职时，他结婚仅四周。在伯克郡，他试图阻止三名青少年偷窃一辆四轮摩托车，结果被一根牵引绳缠住，被犯罪分子的逃逸车以极快速度拖行。这起可怕的罪行震惊了全国，凶手于 2020 年被判定为过失杀人罪。

在政府为了防止监狱系统“崩溃”而推出的最新计划中，这几名男子中的两人现在成为了 5,000 名符合提前释放条件的囚犯之一。首相安迪·伯纳姆（Andy Burnham）曾表示，如果不让监狱系统达到容量上限，他无法找到一种方法将这些杀人犯——以及所有被判定为过失杀人罪的人——继续关押在狱中。而在此之前，已有 100 万人签署请愿书表达愤怒。8 月 11 日，伯纳姆先生让步了：他“越来越有信心”这些臭名昭著的杀人犯将继续被监禁。这场危机是对伯纳姆先生做出艰难决定能力的考验。

2024 年上台数周后，由于监狱已填充至 99%，工党政府实施了一项紧急提前释放计划，这引发了其对犯罪态度软弱的指责。最新的计划更具争议：从 10 月 1 日起，因轻微罪行入狱的罪犯在服刑 33%（而非 40-50%）后将被释放；而包括过失杀人在内的严重罪行被定罪者，在服刑 50%（而非 66%）后将有资格获得假释。

尽管提前释放计划影响了公众认知，但在实践中，司法系统随着时间的推移变得更加严厉。对于大多数犯罪，导致立即监禁判决的定罪比例以及这些判决的平均长度自 2010 年以来有所上升（见图表）。与此同时，目前的监狱容量与 2012 年时相比并没有增加。

政府需要提前释放安排来防止监狱溢出。司法部预计，监狱人口将从目前的 85,600 人（相当于容量的 97%）增加到 2032. 年的 96,000 人。政府正投入 50亿英镑 (680万美元) 在 2031, 年前增加 14,000 个床位，但预计该国明年将再次面临牢房空间不足的问题。

英国在西欧的监禁率最高，但去年被判处立即监禁的 90,000 人中，近三分之二的监禁期限为一年或更短。有大量证据表明，监狱对这类罪犯几乎没有好处，反而促使他们走上犯罪道路。其中约三分之二的人会再次犯罪。

为了应对哈珀警员的死亡，议会在 2022 年修改了法律，对在犯罪时杀死紧急工作人员的人处以强制性终身监禁。但“哈珀法”不能追溯适用。伯纳姆先生希望探索三种方案以腾出更多牢房，从而将哈珀警员的凶手等罪犯锁在狱中：加快 10,000 名外国囚犯的遣返；释放部分 2,300 名被无限期拘留的人员；以及清空部分女子监狱并将其改为男子监狱。

所有这些方案都将充满困难。然而，伯纳姆先生显然极力希望获得公众的支持。■

监禁时间延长

英格兰和威尔士，监禁判决平均长度，年

● 2010 ● 2025

所有可起诉罪行

性犯罪

抢劫

毒品犯罪

欺诈

针对个人的暴力行为

盗窃

来源：司法部

img-40.jpeg

24 英国

苏格兰的毒品灾难

生存之战

格拉斯哥

药物正变得越来越致命。让苏格兰人摆脱药瘾的努力需要加强

大卫·罗瓦特（David Rowat）在东基尔布赖德（East Kilbride）的公寓里濒死地躺了四天。“每一个人生低谷都是一道陷阱门，”这位前海洛因成瘾者说道，“你必须处于最黑暗、最低落的地方，才会渴望改变。”当他的女儿在 2021 年发现他时，他的血液中仅剩几个小时的氧气。

五年前，苏格兰试图摆脱其作为欧洲“药物死亡之都”的名声（见图表）。然而，在额外投入 2.5 亿英镑m (3.36亿美元) 之后，它已连续第七年戴着这顶“王冠”。尽管 2024 年其药物滥用死亡人数为 1,017 人，是 2017 年以来的最低数值，但去年这一数字再次上升，增幅约 8%。

一些批评者认为，苏格兰过于依赖“伤害减轻”（harm reduction）——即管理成瘾者而非治愈他们。“我们建立了一套非常擅长让人们在成瘾状态下生存的系统，但远不足以帮助他们摆脱成瘾，”慈善机构“英国康复之脸与之声”（Faces & Voices of Recovery UK）的安妮玛丽·沃德（Annemarie Ward）认为。但伤害减轻依然至关重要。警察随身携带纳洛酮（naloxone）以防止街头药物过量死亡。去年，格拉斯哥开设了英国首个药物消费室（DCR）进行为期三年的试点：成瘾者可以在医疗监督下服用药物。该设施已防止了约 200 例药物过量死亡。患者还可以进行血液检测、洗热水澡，并获得医疗及其他服务的转诊。

全球大约有 200 个此类场所；爱丁堡也有建设计划。药物政策分析师史蒂夫·罗尔斯（Steve Rolles）表示，苏格兰需要数十个 DCR，以及更便宜的移动式消费室。“认为今天不投资就能省钱，是一种错误的经济观念。”

在美国的阴影下

每百万 15-64 岁人口中的药物相关死亡人数

img-41.jpeg

*所有年龄段，经年龄调整的估计值 † 来源：美国疾控中心（CDC）；欧洲毒品和药物监测中心（EMCDDA）；苏格兰国家记录局；英国国家统计局（ONS）

大约有 44,000 名苏格兰人对阿片类药物产生依赖。在死亡率最高的格拉斯哥，仅有 23 张由公共资金资助的康复床位。精疲力竭的工作人员只能优先处理紧急病例和短期目标。

复吸十分常见。小企业主罗斯·麦肯齐（Ross McKenzie）不得不前往意大利来戒毒。在农村公社度过的四年免费康复期让他摆脱了海洛因成瘾，而此前在亚伯丁一家昂贵的排毒中心短暂就诊两次后，他都复吸了。“它清除了我体内的药物，”他说，“但时间远不足以真正开始治愈。”

解决方案的一部分是为苏格兰人提供药片和针头之外的替代方案。学校已开始投资休闲设施。贫困使这项工作变得更难：最贫困的苏格兰人死于药物滥用的可能性要高得多。而且，药物变得更容易获取。一名前成瘾者透露，你不再需要站在街角等待毒贩出现。社交媒体用户可以将化学兴奋剂直接订购到家。

化学药物也更致命。苏格兰人正在混合使用不同药物的“鸡尾酒”。掺有硝氮类药物（nitazenes）的药物增加令人担忧。这种合成阿片类药物的效力最高可达芬太尼的 500 倍，目前已在售价低至 50 便士一颗的苯二氮卓类药片（“benzos”）中检测到。去年，警方在苏格兰西部发现了英国首个硝氮类药物实验室。

那么，还有什么能提供帮助？“我从未见过像康复咖啡馆那样有效的东西，”目前在格拉斯哥一家此类咖啡馆担任志愿者的罗瓦特先生说。他已经戒毒三年，正在寻找有偿工作。与康复成瘾者的定期会面以及严格的禁欲计划，帮助他恢复了希望和健康。

每周有数千名苏格兰人访问此类中心。但需要就诊的人更多，且长期护理的资金有限。药物伤害每年给苏格兰带来约 60亿英镑 的损失。投资于让成瘾者戒毒的基础设施，既符合经济效益，也具有人文关怀。■

传统主义者 vs 保守主义者

Guga之争

爱丁堡

一项针对古老狩猎活动的禁令揭示了苏格兰民族主义内部的紧张关系

自1549年以来的几乎每个夏天，一群来自刘易斯岛（Isle of Lewis）的男子都会航行到北大西洋的一个无人小岛上，去猎捕雏鸟。这些gugas（盖尔语，意为塘鹅雏鸟）被用棍棒击杀，随后被剖腹、盐渍并保存在盐水中，作为当地的一种美食在全年食用。

然而，今年的狩猎活动将无法进行。苏格兰民族党（SNP）下属的自然遗产机构拒绝授予许可。NatureScot引用的一项研究表明，此次狩猎可能会严重损害该小岛上的塘鹅种群。包括当地工党国会议员在内的反对者表示，这一结果是经过“反向推演”而得出的，目的是为了安抚动物权利活动人士。

此举揭示了苏格兰民族主义内部的分歧。它希望保护文化遗产免受英国政府的侵害，但同时也试图拆除那些与其进步主义感官不符的部分——例如guga狩猎。

这种紧张关系并非新鲜事。2025年1月，该国的考试委员会将罗伯特·彭斯（Robert Burns）从中学生倒数第二年的独立作者名单中移除，以为更多“多样化作品”让路。同年晚些时候，苏格兰民族党推动通过了一项立法，可能强制苏格兰的历史名门分拆其庞大庄园，以稀释高度集中的土地所有权。

苏格兰的民族主义运动从未仅仅围绕文化而组织（不像威尔士和加泰罗尼亚的人们围绕保护母语而凝聚）。它带有左翼色彩——以对抗英格兰被认为的保守主义。而其左翼人士并不希望捍卫杀害雏鸟的行为，即便这是一种被珍视的传统。

img-42.jpeg

Goo goo guga

IDIRA®

介绍 Idira

为 AI 企业保障 每一个身份安全的 下一代平台。

发现身份风险

利用 AI 持续发现每一个身份、 权限和访问路径， 从而识别并立即修复风险。

控制每一项特权

通过对每个身份应用零常驻特权 和即时执行， 实现从静态访问到动态控制的转变。

自动化治理

应用 AI 驱动的策略，通过自动化 整个身份生命周期， 将合规转化为治理。

探索 IDIRA

img-43.jpeg

paloalto® NETWORKS

26 英国

手工艺复兴

拍照留念！

内特尔贝德（NETTLEBED）

英国奶酪种类比法国还多，英国奶酪制造商在思考未来的出路

  1. 圣诞节前几天，内特尔贝德乳品厂（Nettlebed Creamery）遭遇了蓝霉菌危机。当戴安·霍尼（Diane Honey）走进储藏室时，发现 Highmoor 奶酪那桃色的外皮上布满了灰色斑点。在一年中最繁忙的时刻，普通青霉（Penicillium commune）正贪婪地吞噬着所有产品。虽然食用无害，但这些奶酪已无法销售。“它在视觉上并不美观，”霍尼女士说道。这些奶酪最终被送往了食品银行。

这就是那些试图将英国奶酪制作业从崩溃边缘救回的匠人们所面临的考验。“我们不像法国那样拥有奶酪学院来学习手艺，”内特尔贝德乳品厂的创始人罗斯·格里蒙（Rose Grimond，曾就职于《经济学人》）表示，“所以我们只能在实践中犯错——而且往往代价昂贵。”

几个世纪以来，英国的农舍将剩余的牛奶转化为营养丰富且不易腐烂的奶酪。每个时代都留下了自己的印记。罗马人将干奶酪作为士兵的口粮；僧侣们完善了精致的洗皮奶酪品种；而一代代农民则磨练出了如黄油般顺滑的兰开夏（Lancashires）和易碎的温斯利代尔（Wensleydales）等风格。

但战争时期的牛奶配给制合并了许多地方生产，并摧毁了专业学校的生态系统。在两次世界大战期间，农舍奶酪制造商的数量从大约 3,500 下降到 100. 左右。根据 1982. 年出版的帕特里克·兰斯（Patrick Rance）的《大英奶酪书》（The Great British Cheese Book），工业化在 20 世纪 70 年代末将其进一步削减至仅 62 家。当匠人们在 20 世纪 80 年代开始复兴古老配方时，他们实际上是在重新发明轮子。

他们充满热情地开展了这项工作。1994. 年牛奶营销委员会（Milk Marketing Board）的废除带来了额外的推动力。这结束了牛奶的保证价格，激励奶农为过剩的产量寻找更高价值的用途。

英国最大的匠人奶酪展（Artisan Cheese Fair）组织者马修·奥卡拉汉（Matthew O'Callaghan）估计，英国奶酪的品种已增加到 1,400 种左右——根据某些统计，这已然超过法国总数的两倍——且拥有 300 多家奶酪制造商。“你一年 365 天每天都可以品尝到来自不同制造商的不同英国奶酪，”他说。

研究公司 IMARC 表示，随着更多消费者希望奶酪具有明确的产地，且通常与美好的工艺故事和更好的耕作实践相结合，特种品牌的销售增长速度已超过——

超过了整体市场的增长速度。英国奶酪的声誉正在提升。在去年的世界奶酪大奖赛中，14 名入围者中有 3 个来自英国：两款红莱斯特（Red Leicesters）和一款涂灰的软山羊奶酪。

一个有利因素是，由于受原产地名称保护（PDO）法律约束的奶酪较少，且不像在法国那样面临在特定地区生产特定品种的压力，英国奶酪制造商拥有更多的创新自由。斯帕肯霍农场（Sparkenhoe Farm）的红莱斯特是根据 18 世纪的配方制作的。在萨默塞特郡，费尔瑟姆农场（Feltham's Farm）通过将蓝色菌种与极具英国特色的艾尔啤酒洗皮相结合，制作出“叛逆僧侣”（Renegade Monk）奶酪。在萨福克郡，芬农乳品厂（Fen Farm Dairy）通过手工舀取凝乳，制作一种名为 Baron Bigod 的类布里（Brielike）奶酪，采用了一种即使在法国也已变得不那么普遍的古老方法。

美国奶酪制造商乔·施耐德（Joe Schneider）搬到了诺丁汉郡制作“Stichelton”。这种蓝纹奶酪类似于斯蒂尔顿（Stilton），但使用生牛奶——根据欧盟的 PDO 法律（该法律在英国依然适用），“斯蒂尔顿”禁止使用生牛奶——以避免因巴氏杀菌而失去其农场独特的风味。他说，吸引他关注英国奶酪的是它们“与产地的关系，以及产品背后的人”。“法国的熟成师（affineurs）不想让你知道他们的奶酪是从哪里来的，”他说。

接下来的篇章可能会更加艰难。支持—。

尼尔斯庭院乳品店（Neal's Yard Dairy）的采购员布朗温·珀西瓦尔（Bronwen Percival）表示，生产商现在陷入了困境。这家奶酪店一直致力于推动该行业的复兴。原材料和能源成本已经上涨。她表示，新病原体的出现“让生牛奶奶酪制造者感到恐惧”，而这类制造者的数量比十年前要少。

一些奶酪制造者希望在海外市场分一杯羹。英国奶酪（包括手工制作和大规模生产的）出口额从 2023 年的 8.18 亿英镑m 增长到 2025, 的 9.71 亿英镑m (13亿美元)，实际增长了 12%。西欧人习惯于为优质奶酪支付溢价，长期以来一直是最好的买家（在脱欧之前，尼尔斯庭院向法国销售的斯蒂尔顿奶酪比在英国销售的还多），但加拿大和中国购买的数量正在增加。切达奶酪长期以来一直是海外市场的宠儿，占出口价值的 60%；而新鲜奶酪更为娇嫩且保质期较短，不太适合运输。

浓情奶酪

在国内，更多的英国消费者可能会被鼓励将购买奶酪作为一种犒赏。年轻人对奶酪的口味似乎日益浓厚。游说团体“真实奶酪项目”（The Real Cheese Project）发现，在 25 至 34 岁的消费者中，有 35% 的人每周购买一次手工奶酪，而普通人群中的这一比例仅为 17%。

奶酪旅游似乎正成为营销组合中日益增长的一部分。针对资深美食爱好者，总部位于美国的旅行公司 Cheese Journeys 提供为期一周的“英国奶酪奥德赛”之旅，起价 6,200 美元（4,600 英镑）。回到夏季周日的内特尔贝德（Nettlebed），人们在一家名为“奶酪棚”（The Cheese Shed）的改造谷仓里享用奶酪烤三明治。这家农场商店吸引了在奇尔特恩丘陵（Chilterns）骑行和骑马而来的午餐客。游客们透过玻璃墙窥视乳制品厂。“这就像一个奶酪动物园的围栏，”格里蒙女士愉快地说道。■

img-44.jpeg

令人印象深刻的保质期

27

欧洲

img-45.jpeg

公共卫生

无法遏制的蔓延

自疫情以来，欧洲的性传播感染病例激增

追踪性传播感染（STIs）并非易事。许多携带者没有症状，检测覆盖面不一。而且，由于性行为（谢天谢地）通常在私下进行，风险行为往往不被察觉。但公共卫生部门已尽其所能，且近年来他们报告欧洲的性传播感染病例大幅增加。

在过去十年中，感染率剧增（见次页图表），尽管在疫情期间由于监测力度下降和随意性行为减少，感染率有所回落。但在 2021 年之后，病例数再次跃升。今年 5 月，欧盟疾病预防控制中心（ECDC）报告称，在 2024 年（其拥有数据的最近一年），欧洲约有 100,000 例淋病病例，是 2015 年的三倍多。梅毒病例增加了一倍多，达到约 46,000 例。衣原体感染是个例外：在 2022 年达到顶峰后，流行率已回落至 2015 年的水平。

格拉斯哥的性传播感染专家安德鲁·温特（Andrew Winter）博士表示，新冠疫情后立即出现的激增可能部分是因为检测设施恢复运行。但此后的持续增长则无法以此解释。世界卫生组织（WHO）欧洲性传播感染办公室负责人斯特拉·比沃尔（Stela Bivol）博士表示：“传播率确实在真实增长。”

为何会出现这种“性病复兴”？有些人将其归咎于约会软件助长的肆意换伴，但证据不足。此类软件的用户确实更有可能拥有多个伴侣，但这部分是因为寻求多个伴侣的人更有可能使用这些软件。荷兰专家亨利·德弗里斯（Henry de Vries）博士指出，约会软件的出现远早于性传播感染流行率的上升。他说：“我会对此持谨慎态度。”

另一种解释是人们使用避孕套的情况在减少。但同样，相关数据仅具有暗示性。世界卫生组织一项针对 2014 年至 2022 年间欧洲近 250,000 名 15 岁青少年的研究发现，报告的避孕套使用率显著下降。但关于 20 岁及以上人群在全人口范围内的避孕套使用数据却很少。

一个更具体的假设是，使用暴露前预防药物（PrEP，一种对抗 HIV 传播的药物）导致更多男性（尤其是男同性恋者）放弃使用避孕套。布里斯托大学的路易斯·麦格雷戈（Louis MacGregor）及其同事在 2015 年至 2019 年间对一家英国诊所患者进行的一项研究支持了这一观点。

毫无争议的是其危险性。性病通常可以治疗，但如果不能及时发现，后果可能是毁灭性的。随着时间的推移，衣原体和淋病会导致男性睾丸感染和女性不孕。ECDC 注意到的最可怕的现象之一是先天性梅毒的激增，这种疾病由母亲传给婴儿。这种情况虽然罕见，但通常会导致死亡。在 2023 年至 2024 年间，病例数翻了一番，达到 140 例，在保加利亚、匈牙利和葡萄牙出现了集群病例。

对抗性传播感染首先要查明 ▶

→ 本节其他内容

28 俄罗斯禁止和平

29 机场与无人机

29 摩尔多瓦会消失吗？

30 莱茵河水位低，多瑙河干涸

31 查理曼：欧洲的统一者

28 欧洲

► 它们在何处传播。年轻人似乎并非重点。在 2023-24 年的最新数据中，15-24 岁男性的淋病率有所下降，但年龄较大的男性则有所上升。在女性中，淋病率下降，而梅毒率上升了 15%。增幅最大的是 20 至 34 岁人群。梅毒在男男性行为者中的传播似乎尤为严重，但异性恋男女的感染率也大幅上升。

从地理上看，这种增长遍布整个欧洲大陆。2023-24 年淋病增长最剧烈的地区包括保加利亚、法国和意大利，而比利时和匈牙利的梅毒病例则大幅增加。一些贫困国家由于监测不足，报告的感染率低得离谱：在人口 1900 万的罗马尼亚，2024 年仅记录了 24 例衣原体感染病例。

欧洲疾病预防控制中心（ECDC）表示，需要更好的监测，包括各国对弱势群体检测比例的信息。只有三分之一的欧洲国家提供了这些数据。ECDC的流行病学家奥蒂利亚·马德（Otilia Mardh）博士表示，了解感染是通过同性接触还是异性接触传播，有助于制定更好的公共卫生决策。

检测普及的国家则面临不同的问题。医生使用抗生素治疗性传播感染（STI），这导致病原体产生免疫力。淋病已经出现了具有高度耐药性的菌株。衣原体和梅毒目前尚未出现这种情况，但治疗决策涉及权衡收益与风险。荷兰最近取消了针对无症状人群的衣原体筛查，因为研究表明，无症状感染对生育能力的损害程度低于此前的担忧。

即使是梅毒，资源也可以更高效地利用。先天性梅毒易于治疗，可以通过在怀孕期间进行针对性检测来解决。大多数欧盟国家在孕早期对女性进行梅毒检测，但只有不到一半的国家会对孕晚期或分娩时风险最高的人群进行检测。

减少性传播感染的障碍之一是，许多社会较少关注风险最高的人群：男男性行为者、移民和性工作者。在中东欧部分地区，尽管世界其他地方的新发HIV感染病例有所下降，但该地区的感染人数仍在继续上升。部分原因是污名化和歧视阻碍了人们寻求检测和治疗。

但较高的感染率本身也能促成应对措施。在匈牙利，先天性梅毒的报告病例数从2020年的3例激增至2024年的91例（部分原因是检测力度加大），这导致了更为严格的筛查。马德博士指出，她参与的一项最新研究发现，2023-24年间有七个国家的衣原体报告病例数有所下降。此前几年的淋病发病率激增引发了公共卫生宣传活动。有时，恐惧是最好的良药。■

俄罗斯与苹果党（Yabloko）

禁止和平

莫斯科

一个自由党因含蓄反对战争而被禁赛

8月10日，数百名主要是年轻的人聚集在俄罗斯最高法院前。人行道上写满了粉笔字：“为了‘苹果党’，为了和平”；以及阿列克谢·纳瓦尔尼的口号“俄罗斯将获得自由”；还有乌克兰语的“我们没有恐惧，我们拥有爱”。他们通过智能手机聆听法院的审理过程，法院当时正在决定是否允许“苹果党”（Yabloko）参加定于9月20日举行的立法选举。“苹果党”是俄罗斯最古老的自由党，也是唯一公开反对战争的政党。该党的选举宣言仅由43个单词组成，前两句话全部大写：为了和平与自由！为了没有恐惧的生活！

几个年轻人排成一排，吃着苹果。有人拿着一个绿苹果和一面俄罗斯国旗被举在人群之上。一名染着橙色头发的女性显眼地坐着阅读卡夫卡。几个小时后，法官维亚切斯拉夫·基里洛夫（Vyacheslav Kirillov）取消了“苹果党”参加杜马（俄罗斯立法机构下议院）选举的资格。莫斯科的政治战略家德米特里·基谢夫（Dmitry Kisiev）指出：“以前是禁止公开反对战争，现在甚至连简单地公开支持和平也被禁止了。”

针对“苹果党”的案件是由克里姆林宫控制的民族主义政党“祖国党”（Rodina）提起的一项指控其“极端主义”的诉讼。“‘苹果党’是民族叛徒。他们是拥抱西方价值观并要求我们投降的人，”祖国党主席阿列克谢·朱拉夫廖夫（Alexei Zhuravlyov）在提起诉讼后表示。该诉讼还指控“苹果党”使用苏联时期的旧反战歌曲以及展示广岛被炸的照片，涉嫌侵犯美国军队的版权。

相比于“苹果党”被剔除出选票，更令人惊讶的是它在7月29日被允许登记。显然，克里姆林宫的选举顾问（在俄罗斯通常被称为“政治技术专家”）认为这是安全的。自2007年以来，“苹果党”一直未能达到进入杜马所需的5%得票率门槛，这不仅是因为选举舞弊，还因为其支持率较低。直到今年夏天，民调显示其支持率在3%左右。它被视为独立但妥协的，愿意向克里姆林宫做出让步——因此对具有反对倾向的俄罗斯人没有吸引力。

其主要选民群体是苏联时代的年长知识分子。到它登记时，克里姆林宫已经削弱了其领导层，将最知名的候选人剔除出名单。包括列夫·什洛斯伯格（Lev Shlosberg）在内的几人已被逮捕；其他人被宣布为外国代理人。克里姆林宫认为“苹果党”不构成威胁，且允许它将反对派描绘成边缘群体。

但在7月27日，“苹果党”宣布将作为“和平之党”参选。该党领导人尼古拉·雷巴科夫（Nikolai Rybakov）在一次主旨演讲中表示：“我们支持尽早达成停火协议。我们支持外交和谈判。我们主张人类生命的绝对价值，主张免于恐惧和压迫。”民意调查显示，三分之二的俄罗斯人支持与乌克兰进行和平谈判。“苹果党”的人气开始增长。

在民调机构 Russian Field 的调查中，其支持率迅速达到5.3%。到被取消资格时，该支持率已达到9.3%。俄罗斯年轻人吃苹果、唱关于苹果的歌曲或使用苹果表情符号的社交媒体帖子获得了数百万次的浏览量。“苹果党”的 Telegram 频道关注人数增长到超过了弗拉基米尔·普京的政党“统一俄罗斯党”。包括纳瓦尔尼的遗孀尤利娅·纳瓦尔纳亚（Yulia Navalnaya）在内的身在国外的俄罗斯政治人物也对其表示支持。

掌控克里姆林宫的安全部门认为，通过允许该党进行竞选来维持一场真实选举的表象风险过高。政治分析人士弗拉迪斯拉夫·伊诺泽姆采夫（Vladislav Inozemtsev）表示，危险并不在于“苹果党”（Yabloko）可能会重新进入杜马，而在于“他们将能够再次公开且合法地在各地谈论和平的必要性”。允许他们赢得席位将预示着政治变革；而事实上，没有任何变革发生。

这场公开审判凸显了公众停止战争的渴望。至于当局从中吸取什么教训，则是另一回事。如果他们►

淋病卷土重来

欧洲，每100,000人中的性传播感染人数

img-46.jpeg

来源：欧洲疾病预防控制中心

欧洲 29

► 基谢夫先生认为，如果当局认为民众变得日益大胆且抗议潜力在增加，他们可能会得出结论，认为压力、审查和镇压还不够。克里姆林宫可能会在杜马选举结束后尝试另一次军事动员。

强制征兵的威胁是该政权最强大的工具之一。法院宣布禁止“苹果党”（Yabloko）参加选举的决定一出，法院外的年轻人就开始高喊“可耻！可耻！”一名在马路对面面对他们的警察通过扩音器发出警告：“我们现在要把你们全部抓起来。如果有人脑子里在想什么，我请你们离开——去地铁站，去迪斯科舞厅，”他说，“如果你们不散开，请不要生气，但没有人能从兵役招募站把你救出来。” ■

无人机与机场

坠毁计划

德国必须加强应对混合战争的准备

8月4日傍晚，德国的莱比锡-哈勒机场险些酿成灾难。一架携带800克塑料炸药的无人机飞向了一架加满油的乌克兰安东诺夫 An-124, 运输机的机翼，但炸弹从无人机上脱落而未爆炸。如果当时发生了爆炸，这架被乌克兰和北约用于运输军事物资的巨型运输机将陷入火海，停在它旁边的第二架 An-124 也会如此。

这架 FPV 风格的四旋翼无人机在数小时前进入周界时被摄像头拍到。但直到第二天早上，一名巴士司机发现它，用脚将其踩住并发出警报后，才有人注意到。国际战略研究所（IISS）的查理·爱德华兹（Charlie Edwards）表示，这次袭击企图对机场安全的未来具有极其深远的意义；他上个月共同撰写了一篇关于俄罗斯针对欧洲无人机行动的报告。

与去年在欧洲大陆出现的侦察和干扰无人机浪潮相比，这次是公然的升级。莱比锡-哈勒机场是北约和乌克兰的重要物流枢纽。使用武装无人机进行攻击与其说是混合战争，不如说就是纯粹的战争。德国尚未正式将其归咎于俄罗斯，但消息人士认为很快就会这样做。

与其他侵入的无人机不同（例如两天后飞越德国一座爱国者导弹设施的两架中国制造的大型无人机），莱比锡的那架被捕获了，提供了大量证据。调查人员称其为军用级别，并暗示是由与国家有关的参与者制造的。它没有使用机场传感器可能会捕捉到的无线电控制，而是使用了 SIM 卡和 5G 天线，就像一部普通的手机。德国国防部前幕僚长尼科·朗格（Nico Lange）表示，其构造“反映了在乌克兰使用的俄罗斯无人机的设计”。

在发现该无人机后，一架波音 757 在 400 米的高度与某物相撞，可能是一架侦察机或中继无人机。据报道，调查人员在捕获的无人机上发现了 DNA 痕迹，这与 2024, 年的一次失败袭击有关，当时包裹炸弹在装载到货机之前爆炸。该阴谋已被归咎于俄罗斯情报机构 GRU。

朗格先生认为，德国必须采取紧急行动。德国应在 8 月底前在全国主要机场部署多层检测系统。这些系统将结合能够捕捉独特运动模式的雷达、检测移动网络异常的软件、追踪目标的摄像头以及热能和声学传感器。德国已有八个机场计划获得此类增强能力，但进度较慢。

乌克兰战争加速了能够逃避检测的无人机的发展。它们利用跳频、加密、光纤电缆和更高的自主性来迷惑防御系统。即使拥有最先进的检测系统，繁忙的机场也很难防御。天气、鸟类活动、背景噪音和密集的基础设施都为无人机的隐藏提供了便利。

在识别出无人机后，问题在于如何处理。干扰它可能会中断商业飞机的通信。拦截它可能会产生碎片，从而损坏飞机或伤人。为了避免灾难而将其击落可能是正确的做法。但如果没有明确的协议，反无人机团队可能会过于谨慎。

莱比锡这次运气好。欧洲的机场已经得到了一个严厉的警告。即使防御增强，威胁也不会消失。在这种战争中，即使是一次看似失败的袭击，也可能成功地播下焦虑和混乱的种子。 ■

摩尔多瓦与罗马尼亚

消失的可能性

如果不能加入欧盟，那就加入一个欧盟成员国

摩尔多瓦会消失吗？这种情况以前发生过：1918年，在脱离崩溃的俄罗斯帝国后不久，摩尔多瓦议会投票决定加入邻国罗马尼亚。如今，该国目标是在2030年之前加入欧盟。但最近其领导人暗示，如果欧盟阻碍这一进程，那么它可能会与已经是成员国的罗马尼亚统一。

摩尔多瓦总统玛娅·桑杜（Maia Sandu）表示，在关于与罗马尼亚统一的全民公投中，她会投“赞成”票。副总理欧根·奥斯莫切斯库（Eugen Osmochescu）将其称为“B计划”。罗马尼亚总统丹（Nicusor Dan）是一名统一主义者，其他几位罗马尼亚政治人物也是如此。大多数摩尔多瓦人说罗马尼亚语，且在1918年至1940年期间，该国的大部分领土曾属于罗马尼亚。

摩尔多瓦有可能在2029年之前完成欧盟的入盟要求。但同样有可能的是，法国的欧盟怀疑论者无论如何都会阻止它。法国宪法要求在同意让新国家加入欧盟之前，必须经过全民公投或获得议会两院五分之三的批准。摩尔多瓦不太可能在其中任何一项中获胜。此外，到2029年，反对扩员的极右翼民族主义者玛丽娜·勒庞（Marine Le Pen）可能会成为总统。这增加了“东德方案”的吸引力：通过与邻国融合来进入欧盟。

在罗马尼亚，民调显示支持统一的比例约为70%，而在摩尔多瓦约为40%。智库欧洲政策与改革研究所所长尤利安·格罗扎（Iulian Groza）表示，过去十年中，摩尔多瓦的支持率翻了一番。该国人口约为290万；据估计有850,000人（包括居住在国外的人）拥有罗马尼亚公民身份。这更多是出于实用主义而非意识形态，因为这使他们能够在欧盟内工作。但实用主义也可能说服他们放弃独立，以换取在罗马尼亚境内获得欧盟和北约 ►

试图不让局面失控

30 欧洲

成员资格。与此同时，许多人在罗马尼亚选举中投票，并帮助选出了丹先生。

罗马尼亚传播专家鲁芬·赞菲尔（Rufin Zamfir）表示，统一并不在近期议程上。摩尔多瓦领导人的表态“应被解读为向欧洲合作伙伴传递的间接信号”。他说，如果入盟前景被推迟或被削弱，“B计划的可信度就会增加……[并]成为布鲁塞尔无法忽视的政治变量。”

统一并非易事。罗马尼亚不像西德那样富有，能够资助统一。摩尔多瓦贫穷，且无法控制亲俄的分离主义小国德涅斯特河沿岸地区。1994年与亲俄少数民族加告兹人（Gagauz）达成的一项协议规定，如果摩尔多瓦加入罗马尼亚，他们有权选择独立。

然而，这些问题并非不可解决。在目前的困境中，俄罗斯能给德涅斯特河沿岸地区或加告兹地区提供的支持寥寥无几。由于摩尔多瓦与欧盟签署了贸易协定，德涅斯特河沿岸地区70%的出口已经流向欧洲。加告兹地区10万人口分散在四个独立的飞地中。被欧盟边界包围的独立状态将不会是一个诱人的选择。

摩尔多瓦并不是唯一一个可能消失的候选者。阿尔巴尼亚和（绝大多数为阿尔巴尼亚族人的）科索沃的大多数人都支持两国统一。科索沃代理总理阿尔宾·库尔蒂（Albin Kurti）支持融合，但阿尔巴尼亚总理埃迪·拉马（Edi Rama）并不支持；他认为当两国都加入欧盟时，这个问题将得到解决。这两位领导人彼此厌恶，并煽动了已开始导致两国国民分歧的冲突。虽然可能性不大，但并非不可想象：在十年之内，为了实现欧盟成员身份，摩尔多瓦将让位于一个“大罗马尼亚”。而“大阿尔巴尼亚”则更难想象。■

多瑙河与莱茵河

猛犸象与沉没的战舰

柏林

欧洲河流正趋干涸

西欧正面临今年的第五次热浪，莱茵河与多瑙河的水位达到了自1880年官方记录开始以来的最低点。位于莱茵兰-普法尔茨州的中世纪小镇考布（Kaub）的量水标是这条全长1,230公里的河流的基准，因为该地靠近中莱茵河最浅的河段。8月12日，该标显示最大深度仅为12厘米。之前的记录是在2018, 一次干旱期间，当时为25厘米。根据德国内河航运协会的说法，水位在未来几天可能会降至个位数。

img-48.jpeg

Serbs did Nazi that ship for decades

这将使可航行的莱茵河被截断为两段。

多瑙河（欧洲第二长河，仅次于俄罗斯的伏尔加河）的情况也几乎没有好转。布达佩斯的一个量水标显示水位为26厘米，远低于2018. 33厘米的历史最低记录。这威胁到了电力供应。位于布达佩斯附近、提供匈牙利30%电力的帕克斯（Paks）核电站，以及罗马尼亚国有的切尔纳沃德（Cernavoda）核电站，已被部分或全部关闭：它们使用多瑙河的水进行冷却。两国政府已要求工业部门和家庭尽可能削减用电量。匈牙利的奥迪（Audi）和罗马尼亚的达契亚（Dacia）等汽车公司已缩减生产规模。

在两条河流沿岸，低水位使“饥饿之石”显露出来。这些河中巨石是在15世纪至19世纪之间雕刻的，用于标记低水位并警告作物歉收和饥荒。在布达佩斯，它们揭露了一辆第二次世界大战时期的国防军摩托车。在保加利亚的里亚霍沃（Ryahovo）村附近，一头猛犸象的遗骸变得清晰可见。在多瑙河的塞尔维亚河段，一支纳粹时代的战舰舰队现身，其中包括德国在1944年9月为了阻止苏联军队利用该河流而凿沉的约200艘船只。

这些河流发挥着巨大的经济作用。按体积计算，莱茵河约占欧盟内河航道货运流量的三分之二，且占其水路集装箱运输的99%以上。多瑙河则承载了欧盟约8%的货运体积。为了避免搁浅，驳船仅运输正常载货量的15-20%，从而推高了运输成本。“一艘从海尔布隆（Heilbronn）运送岩盐的驳船通常承载2,200吨，但目前它们到达时仅载有280吨，”科隆物流公司Häfen und Güterverkehr Köln的克里斯蒂安·洛伦茨（Christian Lorenz）表示。这仍然是卡车运力的十倍，因此公司继续使用它们。

对于欧洲最大的经济体德国来说，莱茵河尤为关键。每天约有600艘船只跨越德荷边境，其中许多承载着准备从欧洲最大港口鹿特丹出口的货物。煤炭、钢铁、原油、化学品和矿产等大宗货物通过驳船运输比通过卡车或火车更便宜（且更环保）。荷兰银行ING的卡斯滕·布雷斯基（Carsten Brzeski）表示，19世纪沿莱茵河建立的工厂集群是为了利用驳船运输和工业用水，且自那时起一直留在那里。德国制药巨头拜耳（Bayer）总部位于莱茵河东岸的勒沃库森（Leverkusen）。全球最大的化学品制造商巴斯夫（BASF）则位于其同名河流稍南的路德维希港（Ludwigshafen am Rhein）。

在过去十年中，企业已开始适应周期性的低水位危机，通过增加库存并使用专为浅水河流建造的船只来应对。许多企业已将运输方式从河流转向公路或铁路。2017 4.7%的德国所有货物通过内河航道运输；到2024年，这一比例已下降至4.1%。但干旱在很大程度上使两条河流上繁荣的游轮工业陷入停滞。农民担心他们的收成，渔民则担心他们的生计。

经济损失会有多大？根据智库基尔世界经济研究所（Kiel Institute for the World Economy）的数据，2018年的干旱导致德国GDP下降了约0.4%。今年的水位更低，因此损失可能会更严重。布热斯基先生（Mr Brzeski）认为，如果这种情况持续到10月，可能会使德国GDP减少0.5%。但与中欧其他地区一样，现在量化影响还为时过早。欧洲这场打破纪录的干旱仍处于高峰期。■

欧洲 31

欧洲真正的建筑师

“查理曼专栏奖”的提名者是……

要如何才能在欧洲人之间锻造出“日益紧密的联盟”？询问一位布鲁塞尔的欧盟官员，他们会向你指点数十年来通过无数次通宵峰会达成的一系列协调法令。通过将化学品法规、手机充电器、瓶盖设计等标准化，欧盟正朝着联邦制国家推进。欧盟的创始之父们倡导这种方法。由于他们的努力，许多人随后获得了查理曼奖——这是一个由德国亚琛市（该市曾是本专栏命名人物的统治中心）的显贵们颁发的奖项。如今，这项荣誉大多授予欧盟机构的现任主席和其他欧洲权贵。

然而，欧洲一体化肯定不仅仅关乎峰会和监管（对吧？）。那些让欧洲在日常生活中而不仅仅是在理论上感觉像一个单一大陆的人，得到的认可太少了。我们需要一个奖章，颁给那些从未参加过峰会或谈判过指令，却将欧洲人编织在一起的人。人们可以将其称为“查理曼专栏奖”，简称“查理奖”。首届奖项的提名者是……

迈克尔·奥利里（Michael O'Leary）。 欧盟热衷于人员自由流动。自1994年起担任瑞安航空（Ryanair）老板的奥利里先生实现了仅次于此的最佳方案：极其廉价的流动。想在罗马尼亚的一个四线城市度周末？如果你不介意在黎明前起床，并把自己拖到远离人类文明的“二级机场”，你只需支付一份三明治午餐的价格就能抵达。这位脾气暴躁的爱尔兰人通过抨击监管而令欧盟官员恼火——尽管他本人受益于欧盟推动低成本航空公司与死板的国家旗舰航空公司竞争的举措。

索菲亚·科拉迪（Sofia Corradi）。 1969年，这位意大利学者构思了一套系统，使大学生可以在另一个欧洲国家完成部分学位。许多人抓住了参加“伊拉斯谟计划”（Erasmus）一年的机会，该计划现在由欧盟运行。考虑到泛欧洲浪漫爱情的数量——以及被归功于该计划的100多万名“伊拉斯谟婴儿”——目前尚不清楚实际上进行了多少学习。被誉为“伊拉斯谟之母”的科拉迪教授于2025年10月去世。她对“日益紧密联盟”的贡献确实让一些欧洲人变得非常亲密。

麦斯·米科尔森（Mads Mikkelsen）。 一个将詹姆斯·邦德视为目标的阿尔巴尼亚恐怖分子资助者、一个与印第安纳·琼斯竞争的纳粹科学家、一个血腥的北欧战士和一个阴险的法国伯爵，他们有什么共同点？这些角色全部由这位散发着忧郁气息的欧洲反派集大成者饰演。几十年来，英国人在饰演好莱坞反派方面一直处于垄断地位。直到一位颧骨高耸的丹麦人将反派之冠夺回了欧洲大陆。

斯拉沃热·齐泽克（Slavoj Zizek）。 数以亿计的欧洲人对这位斯洛文尼亚哲学家的言论感到集体困惑。拉康-黑格尔的意识形态主体性理论在拉普兰地区与在利古里亚地区一样令人费解。

米尔达·米库特（Milda Mitkute）。 尽管各不相同，但所有欧洲人的衣橱里都装满了不需要的衣服。米库特女士于2008年在维尔纽斯共同创立的Vinted，为上季的双排扣西装外套创建了一个单一市场。其结果是欧洲罕见的科技成功案例。罗伯特·舒曼（Robert Schuman）曾之于煤钢，这家立陶宛公司现在之于一件卑微的Zara开襟羊毛衫。

亚历山大·切费林（Aleksander Ceferin）。 欧足联（UEFA）主席是全球第二有权势的足球管理人员。换个角度看，他是从未向唐纳德·特朗普颁发和平奖的最有权势的足球管理人员。远近各地的欧洲人都赞扬这位斯洛文尼亚人抵制了最近的国际足联（FIFA）世界杯决赛。在海湾国家拥有的俱乐部争夺荣耀的欧冠联赛，是少数能将欧洲人凝聚在一起的固定赛事之一。

盖塔家族（The Guetta family）。 三位出生于法国的兄弟姐妹共同构成了一幅极具代表性的现代欧洲缩影。贝尔纳（Bernard）是一位专注于外交事务和人权的欧洲议会议员。娜塔莉（Nathalie）曾是一名马戏团表演者，现已成为意大利电视荧屏上的明星。他们的同父异母兄弟大卫（David）则是一位超级巨星DJ，他在伊比萨岛创作的赞美诗与牛角面包一样，都是欧洲最成功的文化出口产品。

皮埃尔·科芬（Pierre Coffin）。 欧盟拥有 24 种官方语言。科芬先生创造了第 25 种，且被整个欧盟的孩子们所理解：那就是小黄人（Minions）的方言。这位法国人为这些戴着护目镜的黄色跟班们配音，其喃喃自语在芬兰语或法语的演绎中听起来大抵相同。自拉丁语以来，欧洲再也没有出现过一种如此容易跨越国界被理解的方言。

薇薇安·雷丁（Viviane Reding）。 在 2000 年代后期担任欧盟委员期间，她取消了欧洲人在访问其他欧盟国家时需支付的手机漫游费，解决了这一昂贵的难题。遗憾的是，她还率先制定了数据隐私规则，导致欧洲人现在必须在每个网站上点击关闭那些令人厌烦的“Cookie 弹窗”。这位卢森堡政治人物提醒人们，欧盟官僚机构（Eurocracy）既能成就崇高之举，也能制造荒诞之作。

而查理奖将授予……

或许，现代欧洲的统一者根本就不是什么“优秀的欧洲人”。没有什么比其敌人更能激起整个大陆的集体震动了。比如俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京，他对乌克兰的入侵揭示了欧盟此前不为人知的刚毅一面。特朗普先生则通过威胁退出北约，刺激了欧洲的国防努力。维克多·欧尔班在担任匈牙利总理期间，竭尽全力试图敲诈并干扰欧盟，但最终失败了。

因此，首届“查理奖”或许应该授予一个通过反对欧洲反而强化了欧洲的人——尽管其方式比普京先生更具建设性。一个如此矛盾的获奖者跃入脑海。因为他证明了留在欧盟的价值，而非忍受脱欧的混乱，并将脱欧变成了一个全欧洲的警戒故事，作为其意识形态的设计师，奈杰尔·法拉奇被授予首届查理曼专栏奖。这位欧盟最著名的抨击者，证明了自己是欧盟最有用的一位联邦主义者。Glückwunsch!（祝贺！）■

投资于网络安全与现实世界应用的交汇点。

NRW 欧洲的 / i / 心跳

了解更多：nrwglobalbusiness.com

img-50.jpeg

33

美国

img-51.jpeg

艾奥瓦州政治

自食其果

德梅因

共和党的政策让艾奥瓦州陷入困境。选民们准备好做出改变了吗？

罗布·桑德（ROB SAND）的竞选噱头——如果他确实有的话——更适合出现在诺曼·洛克威尔（Norman Rockwell）的画作中，而非 TikTok 的动态里。这位艾奥瓦州州长民主党候选人在举行市政厅会议时，会以合唱《美丽美国》（America the Beautiful）开场。他邀请人群中的共和党人表明身份；而那些这样做的人则会赢得掌声。然而，担任该州审计员、性格温和的桑德先生在面对灾难时并不回避。他最近坚称，艾奥瓦州正处于三种危机的煎熬之中：“经济危机、癌症危机和教育危机”。许多选民对此表示赞同。

十多年来，艾奥瓦州在州级和联邦级选举中一直坚定地投票给共和党。自 2016 年以来，共和党一直主导该州立法机构；自 2006 年以来，没有民主党人赢得州长之位，自 2008 年以来没有赢得参议院席位，自 2020 年以来没有赢得国会选举。在最近的一次总统选举中，唐纳德·特朗普在该州的领先优势超过 13 个百分点。

然而，艾奥瓦州仍有大量独立选民——占注册选民的 35%——且他们似乎正在向左翼倾斜。根据 8 月 6 日公布的一项艾默生学院 / Nexstar（Emerson College / Nexstar）民意调查，桑德先生目前领先于他的共和党对手。民主党参议院候选人乔什·图雷克（Josh Turek）正处于一场激烈的竞争中。此外，四个国会选区中有三个具有竞争力。随着民粹主义左翼在其他地方的推进，艾奥瓦州正提供一个不同的范例，展示民主党如何可能重新夺回权力。

他们的机会源于人们对共和党政策（无论是州级还是国家级）日益增长的不满。许多艾奥瓦州人对特朗普先生的政治认同感正在消退，这位总统的净支持率为 -8。艾奥瓦州立大学农业与农村政策教授大卫·彼得斯（David Peters）表示，部分原因是其经济政策的负面影响日益剧烈。去年，艾奥瓦州大豆生产者的净农场收入下降了一半。今年，受伊朗战争推高的燃料和化肥价格将使情况进一步恶化。

政府对移民的打击正在造成另一种代价，限制了艾奥瓦州肉类包装厂可用的劳动力。这也加深了艾奥瓦州更广泛的人口问题。由于长期以来居民流向其他州，外国移民成为了新工人的关键来源。

对环境政策的反弹也在增加。政府提交了一份简报，寻求限制针对化学巨头拜耳（Bayer）的癌症相关诉讼，该公司生产一种常用的杀虫剂。最高法院在 6 月份支持了该公司。但在艾奥瓦州，这里既有大型农场，也有用水受到农场径流影响的居民，这一问题正变得越来越具有争议。艾奥瓦州的癌症发病率在全国排名第二高。科学家们并不清楚具体是什么原因导致了这一点，但艾奥瓦州是仅有的三个发病率在增长的州之一。在过去的两个夏天，德梅因以化肥中发现的高浓度硝酸盐为由，对居民用水实施了限制。艾奥瓦大学的大卫·克维特尼（David Cwiertny）表示：“有 600,000 名艾奥瓦州人无法按照他们想要的方式使用水。”

→ 本节其他内容

34 一种新的关税武器

35 瞄准疫苗

35 威斯康星州的回归

36 邮寄投票依然存在

37 佛罗里达州的转型

38 列克星敦：来自英国的教训

34 美国

如果说特朗普先生在理论上比在实践中对艾奥瓦州人更有吸引力，那么该州即将离任的共和党州长金·雷诺兹（Kim Reynolds）的记录则更加令人反感。保守派地主对她否决一项旨在对碳捕集项目管道实施额外限制的法案感到愤怒。温和派选民则对她限制性的新堕胎政策感到不满，该政策禁止在怀孕六周后进行堕胎，且仅在强奸罪被迅速举报的情况下才允许例外。一项广泛的学校代金券计划被证明尤其具有极化影响。

在2022年至2025年之间，艾奥瓦州的公立学校失去了13,000名学生，占总入学人数的3%。其中一部分归因于人口流失。然而，2023年引入的学校代金券加速了这一衰退。根据该计划，无论收入如何，州政府向每个家庭每名学生提供约$8,000，用于私人教育。由于州政府根据人头为学校提供资金，失去学生的学校就会失去资金。

原本就因注册人数极少而勉强维持的农村学校进一步萎缩，但影响范围很广。“仅仅因为你是一个大型学区或位于艾奥瓦州的都市区，并不意味着你没有感受到同样的入学人数下降压力，”西德梅因社区学校（West Des Moines Community Schools）的首席财务官库尔特·苏布拉（Kurt Subra）表示。5月底，艾奥瓦州中部的二年级教师珍娜·刘易斯（Jenna Lewis）在艾姆斯（Ames）——一座人口约66,000人的城市——获得了一份工作。她说她当时“非常兴奋”；艾姆斯是一个规模更大、更富裕的学区，而且这个职位带来了$12,000的加薪。两周后，校长打电话撤回了录取通知。由于入学人数低，学校决定取消她的班级。

面对选民的挫败感，民主党人与其说是在抓住机会，不如说是在礼貌地迎接机会。州议员图雷克（Turek）先生在2022年通过关注经济赢得了他那个亲特朗普的选区。在与共和党国会议员艾希莉·欣森（Ashley Hinson）竞争一个空缺的参议院席位时，他称自己为“草原民粹主义者”，讨论钱包问题，同时暗示腐败是许多艾奥瓦州人陷入困境的原因。

桑德（Sand）先生试图将自己塑造为一个非党派的务实主义者。6月，他以州审计师的身份发布了一份报告，认为2025年使用代金券的家庭中近80%原本就已经将孩子送往私立学校，这使州政府多花费了超过2.5亿美元。腐败的主题出现在他的市政厅会议中（作为前公诉人，他具有一定的公信力），但他避免将个人妖魔化。相反，他将责任归咎于一个由“两个私人俱乐部”支撑的系统，这些俱乐部利用政治部落主义来“掏我们的口袋”。他辩称，他不会将民主党的议程带到德梅因，而是一个基于独立性和问责制的议程。

德梅因的民主党战略家马特·保罗（Matt Paul）记得他在1998年参与汤姆·维尔萨克（Tom Vilsack）的州长竞选活动。当时艾奥瓦州已有30多年没有选出民主党州长了。“汤姆的竞选活动提出了一个非常简单的口号，”保罗先生说：“是时候轮作了。”他注意到桑德先生和其他人采用了这个口号。“对我来说，这感觉非常像'98年。”在2024年投票给特朗普先生的独立人士中，现在支持桑德先生的人数领先17个百分点。■

外交政策

贸易手段

唐纳德·特朗普正获得一种针对俄罗斯的新关税武器

“看看我们在这里成就了什么，”林赛·格雷厄姆在今年2月得知唐纳德·特朗普发起了美国对伊朗的战争时感叹道，“我几乎要流泪了。”这位上个月去世的共和党参议员，在看到美国力量的最新展示时，可能会再次热泪盈眶。8月7日，参议院以 86 票对 11 票通过了《林赛·O·格雷厄姆制裁俄罗斯和伊朗法案》。该法案

img-52.jpeg

潜在目标

尚未在众议院获得通过，但得到了特朗普先生的支持。

该立法聚焦于俄罗斯，同时采用了制裁的“手术刀”和关税的“大锤”。它对俄罗斯官员、寡头、银行、国防工业和能源项目实施制裁——甚至包括去年美俄谈判中被提出作为合作候选领域的北极能源开发。在俄罗斯签署一份被乌克兰接受的和平协议之前，这些处罚不得取消。

更不寻常的是，该法案对俄罗斯石油前五大进口国、俄罗斯天然气前五大进口国，以及帮助俄罗斯规避制裁的国家的所有商品征收最高 100% 的关税。这将波及十几个国家，其中包括美国的许多盟友。但有两个重要的例外条件：如果某个国家的采购量占俄罗斯天然气出口的比例低于 15%，且正在采取措施减少这些采购，则可获得豁免。这应该能让法国和比利时等盟友幸免。该法案还包含一项“国家利益”豁免条款，给予总统很大的自由裁量权。

根据实施方式的不同，这些措施可能会对俄罗斯产生重大影响。石油和天然气提供了政府收入的 20-25%。华盛顿彼得森国际经济研究所的埃琳娜·里巴科娃（Elina Ribakova）表示：“从字面上看，这将对俄罗斯的石油出口产生毁灭性影响。你面对的是一个今年增长可能为零、处于滞胀状态的经济体。”

但目前尚不清楚特朗普政府希望在多大程度上挤压俄罗斯的石油部门。美国已经向乌克兰提供了情报，帮助其攻击俄罗斯的能源基础设施。这些袭击引发了俄罗斯国内的燃料危机。7月份，俄罗斯的化石燃料出口收入环比下降了 12%。通过管道出口原油的收益下降了 21%，而石油产品出口装载量下降了 23%，跌至历史最低水平。

8月12日，乌克兰表示其攻击了位于前线后方近 1,000 英里的奥尔斯克（Orsk）的一家炼油厂。然而，同一天《金融时报》报道称，美国副总统 J.D. 万斯（J.D. Vance）已要求乌克兰总统弗拉基米尔·泽连斯基（Volodymyr Zelensky）停止对黑海一个管道终端的攻击，因为担心会损害美国公司并推高油价。

警惕附带损害

特朗普先生可能还担心，如果将关税执行到最大程度，可能会破坏其他外交政策优先级。中国、印度和土耳其是俄罗斯原油的最大进口国。北约盟友斯洛伐克可能会触及石油阈值，且几乎没有改变此现状的计划。日本则依赖俄罗斯天然气。在实践中，该法案赋予了特朗普先生一个灵活的执行梯度：关税可以设定在略高于零到100%之间的任何区间，并根据各国购买俄罗斯能源的多少进行调整。

美国 35

十名民主党参议员对该法案投了反对票，担心这会给特朗普先生在贸易战中提供一件新武器。一种风险是，与俄罗斯相关的关税会成为无关贸易谈判中的筹码。另一种风险是，惩罚会被选择性地实施——针对朋友而非对手，正如特朗普先生经常做的那样。

这项立法是关税在美国国家治理中作用日益扩大的又一迹象。特朗普先生此前已经对援助伊朗的国家征收了前所未有的“次级”关税。新法案将同样的理念应用于俄罗斯。朱利安·阿拉托（Julian Arato）、凯瑟琳·克劳森（Kathleen Claussen）和蒂莫西·迈耶（Timothy Meyer）在一篇新论文中指出，悖论在于，这种关税权力的扩张反映了一种比特朗普先生早前征税“更符合宪法原则的方法”。■

疫苗

怀疑的加强针

纽约

政府再次抨击儿童疫苗

早在担任真人秀明星期间，唐纳德·特朗普就曾在推特上写道：“健康的幼儿去看医生，被注射了大量多种疫苗……自闭症。”12年多后的8月10日，特朗普将这一可疑主张背后的想法付诸行动。一项新的行政命令规定，麻疹、腮腺炎和风疹三联疫苗应拆分为三种疫苗。该命令建议在不同的就诊时间接种这些疫苗及其他疫苗。此外，它将儿童疫苗分为三类：推荐所有人接种的（涵盖11种疾病和感染，低于之前的18种）、针对高风险人群的，以及在咨询医生后决定是否接种的。

没有证据表明疫苗会导致自闭症。也没有证据表明分散接种疫苗是有益的。事实上，这样做反而增加了儿童易受感染的窗口期。因此，医生团体纷纷站出来谴责该命令。美国儿科学会负责人称其“不仅令人沮丧，而且非常危险”。美国医学会负责人表示，这使“儿童的健康处于风险之中”。

那么，好消息是，特朗普的命令在实际操作中几乎没有影响。通常由州政府而非联邦政府设定学童的疫苗接种要求。而且大多数州都遵循充足的证据，即疫苗已将传染病发病率降低到了惊人的程度（见图表）。

但随着政府在疫苗决策中注入更多怀疑和混乱，越来越多的父母开始拒绝接种。幼儿园儿童的麻疹疫苗接种覆盖率为92.5%，低于2019年的95.2%。这是一个令人担忧的低水平：据估计，一个社区必须有92-94%的人拥有免疫力才能阻止麻疹传播。许多地区已经低于该阈值，这解释了为什么2026年的麻疹病例数已经超过了整个2025年。

这项行政命令并非政府首次对疫苗出手。今年1月，疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）试图削减儿童的接种计划。一名法官叫停了这些变更；该案目前正在上诉中。5月，另一项行政命令指示CDC效仿那些推荐接种疫苗数量较少的国家。影响最深远的是，政府削减了对下一代mRNA疫苗的资金支持。

根据《经济学人》与YouGov的一项民意调查，近80%的美国人认为疫苗是安全的，其中也包括大多数共和党人。特朗普青睐的民调专家曾敦促他关注小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪议程的其他部分，例如这位卫生部长对营养食品的推广。特朗普决定无视该建议，表明疫苗不仅是肯尼迪的执念，也是总统的执念。■

威斯康星州政治

被遗弃的左翼

密尔沃基

威斯康星州的意外反转为民主党温和派带来喘息之机

8月11日上午，在密尔沃基的一家投票站外，塞布利·萨宾（Sabley Sabin）看起来有些沮丧。“我没有随心投票，”这位刚刚参加完威斯康星州民主党州长初选的退休社会工作者说道。她称主流民主党人为“懦夫”，更倾向于支持激进的民主社会主义者弗朗西斯卡·洪（Francesca Hong）。但她最终投票给了大卫·克劳利（David Crowley，见次页照片）。她认为，这位温和的密尔沃基县行政主管更有机会建立起在威斯康星州这样的摇摆州赢得选举所需的联盟。

其他威斯康星州居民似乎也与萨宾女士的考量一致。数周以来的民调显示，洪女士有望以两位数的优势获胜。但最终，克劳利先生击败了她——尽管领先优势仅约为 3,800 票。他的胜利表明，对温和主义和胜选能力的诉求依然重要，尤其是在摇摆州。然而，洪女士尽管背负沉重的政治包袱却几乎获胜，这表明民主党联盟正处于愤怒和不安之中，且日益接纳左翼民粹主义候选人。

有理由认为，拥有深厚进步政治历史的威斯康星州，可能是像洪女士这样候选人的肥沃土壤。但她所主张的一些观点被证明成了累赘。在一条旧推文中，她呼吁取消感恩节，称其是在庆祝殖民主义。在另一条推文中，她写道，快餐连锁店 Culver's 里的白人老人让她感到“焦虑”。她还曾表达过支持废除警察制度。当被追问这些言论时，她难以给出合理解释。巴拉克·奥巴马的前顾问大卫·艾克塞尔罗德（David Axelrod）将这场竞选形容为“一辆缓缓驶向悬崖的汽车”。甚至一些左翼最知名的人物也保持距离，伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）和亚历山德里娅·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯（Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez）都没有为洪女士背书。 ▶

因果关系

美国，可预防疾病病例*，000

img-53.jpeg

-54.

-55.

-56.

-57.

Sources: Our World in Data; CDC; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

*数据截至2026年8月6日或最新可用数据

36 美国

尽管如此，民调显示她在竞争激烈的局面中领先19个百分点。克劳利先生于7月8日暂停了竞选，称自己没有获得提名的路径。建制派民主党人试图团结在副州长萨拉·罗德里格斯（Sara Rodriguez）周围的努力，在她因财务管理不善解雇竞选经理后破裂。直到最后阶段，该党的权力掮客们才行动起来。克劳利先生重新参加竞选，并赢得了民主党州长托尼·埃弗斯（Tony Evers）的认可，而后者此前曾誓言不参与初选。这场操纵如此混乱，以至于密尔沃基一个投票站的几名选民甚至没有意识到克劳利先生曾经暂停过竞选。

广告可能帮助克劳利先生缩小了与洪女士的差距，后者在广播或有线电视上没有购买过任何广告。民调也可能夸大了他的劣势。在一周之内，调查第二次大幅高估了一位左翼候选人的领先优势（另一次情况发生在密歇根州的参议院初选）。

无论他的回归如何解释，克劳利先生现在有机会成为该州首位黑人州长。挡在他面前的是汤姆·蒂法尼（Tom Tiffany），一名获得唐纳德·特朗普认可的共和党国会议员。蒂法尼先生已经在将他的对手描绘成与洪女士毫无区别。初选后一天，他转发了一段采访，其中克劳利先生表示他们的政策之间几乎没有区别。

尽管如此，主流民主党人感到宽慰，因为他们担心洪女士在面对蒂法尼先生时几乎没有机会。在经历了一个彻夜等待计票的失眠之夜后，资深民主党战略家乔·泽佩基（Joe Zepecki）对克劳利先生的胜利赞不绝口。他说，在未来的几十年里，“竞选活动将传唱大卫·克劳利及其史诗般回归的歌曲。” ■

-58.

一个适度的成功

选举法

快速行动

纽约

唐纳德·特朗普对邮寄投票的攻击看来注定失败

在2024年，大约三分之一的美国人通过邮寄方式投票，其中包括大约四分之一的共和党人（见图表）。然而九个月后，唐纳德·特朗普誓要“除掉邮寄选票”。这位总统虚假地声称，邮寄投票中的舞弊导致他在2020年败选。到目前为止，他在国会和法院中试图为这种受欢迎的投票方式设定新限制的努力均未取得成效。他于3月31日签署的、指示美国邮政署（USPS）充当选票把关人的行政命令也正在失效。

8月11日，马萨诸塞州的一位联邦法官阻止了特朗普命令中的主要条款，且该裁决在全国范围内生效。因迪拉·塔尔瓦尼（Indira Talwani）法官指出，在期中选举前不到三个月，总统这一“前所未有的指令”正给选民“造成混乱”。全美50个州都提供邮寄投票，其中八个州完全通过邮寄方式进行选举。尽管特朗普做出了努力，但本轮选举周期中此类选票的规则现在看来不太可能改变。

特朗普的命令试图通过一系列复杂的名单和新的邮政规则，将邮寄选票和缺席选票置于联邦控制之下。该命令指示国土安全部（DHS）创建“州公民名单”，识别所有18岁或以上的公民并将其发送至各州。随后，各州必须向邮政署提供有资格获得此类选票的选民名册，据推测是在咨询国土安全部名单之后——尽管该命令并未明确规定这一点。最后，各州必须使用由美国邮政署设计、带有特殊标记和条形码的新信封。邮政署被禁止投递使用未经授权信封或由相关名单中缺失的选民寄出的选票。

这种混乱的名单甚至让像圣母大学的德里克·穆勒（Derek Muller）这样的选举法专家感到困惑。“对我来说，这些不同的名单究竟应该如何相互作用，目前非常不清楚，”他说。部分混乱在于时间节点。联邦政府向各州发送名单以及各州向美国邮政署发送名单的截止日期均为选举前60天，这似乎使得前者很难在此时告知后者。

但法律上的缺陷比扭曲的物流问题更深。宪法赋予各州设定国会选举的“时间、地点和方式”的权力，并允许国会“制定或改

请给我信封

美国，邮寄投票选民百分比

img-59.jpeg

来源：麻省理工学院选举数据与科学实验室（MIT Election Data & Science Lab）

这些规定。总统在其中未被提及。用塔瓦尼（Talwani）女士的话来说，“行政部门没有权力监管选举”。她认为，特朗普先生的政策粗暴地践踏了美国的权力分立。

最高法院正在审议政府于7月27日提交的一项请求，要求撤销塔瓦尼女士此前的一项范围较窄的裁决。（8月12日，政府提交了一份补充请求，要求法院迅速做出裁决。）但圣路易斯华盛顿大学的法学教授特拉维斯·克鲁姆（Travis Crum）表示，随着选举截止日期的临近，大法官们在两周多时间里保持沉默，这对该请求来说并非好兆头。而且，即使最高法院推翻了她的初步裁决，塔瓦尼女士在另一起案件中做出的新裁决——该案由投票权利团体和非裔美国女性社团 Delta Sigma Theta（该社团提供选举教育）提起——仍将成为政府的障碍。加州大学洛杉矶分校的里克·哈森（Rick Hasen）认为，这项行政命令“完全不可行”，今年秋天几乎没有希望得以实施。

特朗普先生继续推动其他选举规则的变更，但这些尝试看起来同样前途渺茫。一项关于选民登记的法案《拯救美国法案》（SAVE America Act）在8月休会前未能通过参议院，且支持率极低。特朗普先生不排除采取更激进的措施，包括将选举国有化，但此举没有先例，也没有宪法依据。正如特朗普先生可能意识到的那样，这些努力的主要成果可能不是改变中期选举的规则，而是让人们对选举结果产生更大的不信任。■

美国 37

佛罗里达的转型

MAGA之乡

奥卡拉

罗恩·德桑蒂斯将一个摇摆州变成了共和党的红色州。但佛罗里达州的下一任州长必须将重心从文化战争转向生活成本

罗恩·德桑蒂斯（Ron DeSantis）绝非房间里最有魅力的人，但他往往是最令人生畏的人。今年2月，佛罗里达州州长在拿坡里的一家政治俱乐部发表讲话，回顾了他的两任任期。“我担任州长的第一天坐在那里，看着空荡荡的办公室，心想：听着，我不知道哪个混蛋（SOB）会接我的班，但他们将没什么可做的，因为我会把骨头上的肉全部啃干净，”他说。在职七年后，德桑蒂斯认为自己已经实现了目标。“这就是我们所做的一切。”

8月18日，佛罗里达州的选民将选出代表民主党和共和党的候选人，由他们竞争成为那个“混蛋”。共和党国会议员拜伦·唐纳兹（Byron Donalds）预计将轻松赢得党内提名。正如民调专家预测的那样，如果唐纳兹在11月当选州长，他将继承一个与十年前截然不同的州。这个曾经是美国典型的摇摆州，如今已成为共和党权力的堡垒。

这在一定程度上归功于唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump），德桑蒂斯与他的关系一直起伏不定。在2024年总统竞选期间，特朗普将他当时的竞争对手贬称为“罗恩·德桑蒂蒙尼奥斯”（Ron DeSanctimonious，意指伪善）。此后，总统选择了一些佛罗里达人担任其最高顾问，并将他的海湖庄园（Mara-Lago）度假村变成了白宫非正式的南方分馆。他就这样将佛罗里达州烙上了“MAGA之乡”的印记。

然而，德桑蒂斯改变了这个州本身。在新冠肺炎（covid-19）疫情之前，民主党人的数量多于共和党人，佛罗里达州的选举总是惊险万分。但这种情况在疫情最严重时期开始发生变化，当时德桑蒂斯与美国大部分地区的做法背道而驰，宣布佛罗里达州全面恢复商业活动。在短短两年内，该州净增居民近100万，平均每天增加1,500人。

保持开放，尤其是在一个老年人口如此之多的州，是有代价的。在2021, 7月至11月的一波疫情期间，佛罗里达州的人均死亡率是全国平均水平的三倍多。但德桑蒂斯几乎没有面临持久的反弹。大多数新居民是注册共和党人。与此同时，该州的民主党在招募候选人或吸引捐款方面举步维艰。2022年，德桑蒂斯以19个百分点的优势赢得连任，这是该州历史上共和党人取得的最大胜幅。他的政党横扫了所有州级公职，并在立法机构中获得了绝对多数席位。

一党之政引发了一场政策闪击战。德桑蒂斯颁布了六周禁堕法案，禁止为儿童提供跨性别医疗服务，创建了美国规模最大的学校代金券计划，并重写了州立大学的课程。他还因迪士尼公司反对一项禁止在课堂教授性取向和性别认同的法律而与其对抗，撤销了该公司的特殊税收待遇。这场斗争成为了全美敢于发声的企业的一个警戒案例。

为了巩固该州新的政治身份，德桑蒂斯拒绝了立法机构制定的国会选区图并自行绘制，解雇了两名民选的民主党检察官，并召集特别会议强迫立法者执行他的优先事项。他还重塑了司法系统，任命了州最高法院七名法官中的六名以及近200名其他法官。立法者并不总是欢迎他的要求，但只要有人违背他的意愿，州长就会迅速否决他们的项目或支持其竞争对手。“德桑蒂斯是佛罗里达州的‘800磅大猩猩’（指拥有绝对支配权的人），”曾在州长竞选活动中工作的战略师尼克·伊亚罗西（Nick Iarossi）表示，“没人想得罪他。”

动力十足

在德桑蒂斯先生任职期间，佛罗里达州的 GDP 增长速度超过了全国平均水平。今年，该州规模达 $1.8trn 的经济体成为了世界第 14 大经济体，超过了澳大利亚和墨西哥。诸如 Citadel 和 Palantir 等大公司将其总部迁至佛罗里达州。德桑蒂斯先生的支持率略高于 50%——高于特朗普先生在该州的支持率。

唐纳兹先生与德桑蒂斯先生截然不同。这位国会议员在布鲁克林由单亲母亲抚养长大，青少年时期曾因持有大麻被捕。他说，在 Cracker Barrel 餐厅的停车场里，他在向耶稣献身之后，生活发生了转折。他曾在银行界工作，随后当选进入国会。2023 年，当激进的众议院共和党人试图罢免凯文·麦卡锡的议长职务时，他们聚集在亲切的唐纳兹先生周围，将他推举为全国性的 MAGA 人物。特朗普先生很欣赏他。去年，他在社交媒体上写道：“跑起来，拜伦，跑起来！”（意指参选）。

尽管德桑蒂斯先生打趣说唐纳兹先生“并未参与我们在当地取得的任何一场击败左翼的胜利”，但这位国会议员的回应只有赞美之词。他在 8 月初告诉选民：“他做得非常出色。”在政策方面，他说两人之间没有分歧。他与德桑蒂斯先生唯一公开的分歧在于佛罗里达州非裔美国人历史课程的修订，该课程声称奴隶“培养了能够用于个人利益的技能”——这一说法被身为少数派黑人共和党人的唐纳兹先生称为“错误”。

下一任州长必须更多地关注成本而非文化。自 2020 年以来，佛罗里达州的房价和保险保费分别飙升了 50% 和 75%，增速快于大多数其他州。而收入仅增长了 30%。这给普通民众带来了生存压力。人口增长正在剧烈放缓。唐纳兹先生表示，“可负担性”是他的首要任务。全国各地的州长也都这么说。如果唐纳兹先生能向他们展示如何实现这一点，他对佛罗里达州的影响力可能会超过德桑蒂斯先生。■

他，自以为圣洁？

38 美国

民主党能从英国学到什么

如何防止极端分子让一个政党失去竞争力

尼尔·金诺克（NEIL KINNOCK）在美国最出名的地方，在于他是那个被乔·拜登剽窃演说词的人。1987年，拜登被这位英国工党领袖关于自己是家族“一千代”以来第一个上大学的人的措辞深深吸引，于是借用了这段话。起初，他注明了出处；随后在电视采访中，他却没这么做。由此引发的轩然大波导致拜登的首次总统竞选失败。

然而，现在被称为金诺克勋爵的这位人物，并不只是那个让拜登在参议院又熬了21年艰苦岁月的男人。他还通过清除渗透进党内的极左极端分子，帮助英国主要的中左翼政党重新获得了竞争力。他的故事值得民主党研究。

民主党同样在与渗透者作斗争：美国民主社会主义者（DSA）是一个势头强劲的民粹左翼团体。本周，DSA遭遇了挫折——曾呼吁废除警察制度的弗朗西斯卡·洪（Francesca Hong）在竞选威斯康星州下一任州长的民主党提名时以微弱差距落败。但受DSA支持的候选人在初选中赢得了足够多的席位，并制造了足够大的动静，令共和党人欣喜若狂。

这与20世纪80年代的英国情况惊人地相似。当时，保守党首相玛格丽特·撒切尔通过限制工会和私有化国有产业，激怒了左翼。（与MAGA不同，玛吉相信自由市场。）工党渴望将她赶下台，但首先必须让选民相信自己是值得信赖的。而一个名为“战斗小组”（Militant）的马克思主义团体让这件事变得更加困难，该团体实践“渗透主义”：其干部并不在自己的旗号下竞选公职，而是进入一个更大的政党，试图将其推向极左——正如DSA之于民主党一样。

“战斗小组”比DSA更极端，也更隐秘。在公开场合，它提供简单的口号：缩短工时、提高工资、将200家最大的私营公司国有化，等等。但根据列夫·托洛茨基的公式，这个公开平台仅仅是实现其真实秘密议程的一步：领导一场革命，就像在斯大林走得太远之前的俄罗斯那样。

委婉地说，“战斗小组”的领导层与中间选民完全脱节。在布拉德福德，受“战斗小组”支持的工党候选人帕特·沃尔（Pat Wall）呼吁推翻国家，并预言一场伴随着“可怕的死亡、破坏和流血”的“内战”。

不出所料，“战斗小组”的秘密议程并未保持秘密。20世纪80年代的英国拥有极其擅长挖掘丑闻的媒体，以及一个采取强硬手段的执政党。一名《星期日泰晤士报》的记者秘密录下了沃尔关于“内战”的言论；保守党则在竞选广告中幸灾乐祸地引用了这些话。那种工党正被可怕的马克思主义者接管的感觉，使得该党在18年间一直无法执政。在“战斗小组”最终掌控的唯一一座大城市利物浦，它带来了无法无天、财政崩溃和无休止的丑闻。

当时的英国与现在的美国之间存在差异。DSA并没有策划一场暴力革命。它痴迷于反对以色列，而“战斗小组”则认为全球每一场冲突都可以用社会主义来抚慰。DSA对同性恋权利充满热情；而根据《战斗小组》（一本关于该运动的优秀著作）作者迈克尔·克里克（Michael Crick）的转述，“战斗小组”认为同性恋是“在社会主义制度下将会消失的问题”。

然而，这两个事件的共同点在于，一个小团体持有不受欢迎且具有潜在灾难性的政策，并决心将这些政策强加给一个更大的政党。对于DSA来说，关键的洞察在于初选的投票人数不多，因此一个组织良好的渗透团体只需要争取少数激进分子，就能夺得民主党的提名。

对于“战斗员”（Militant）而言，其方法是在追随者中培养一种类似邪教的忠诚，同时向外界否认其“党中之党”的存在（其最高领导层声称自己仅仅是《战斗员》报纸的编辑）。其基层士兵会加入当地的工党分会而不透露真实的忠诚对象，并且无论会议多么枯燥，他们都会出席每一次会议。他们会与其他左翼人士组成派系，并通过出席率来赢得该派系的控制权。他们会重复这一过程，直到控制整个分会。金诺勋爵（Lord Kinnock）回忆道：“他们表现出来的总是优先考虑在党内获取权力，而非为党获取权力。”

1985年10月，在一次工党会议上，金诺勋爵谴责了极左翼的“不可能实现的承诺”和“僵化的教条”，以及由“战斗员”掌控的利物浦所陷入的“荒诞的混乱”。在电视上，他称“战斗员”是“工党身体里的一条蛆”，并勇敢地面对一群对其大吼“工贼”（scab）的敌对支持者——这是左翼词典中最严重的侮辱，意指跨越警戒线地背叛阶级的叛徒。

他开始着手将“战斗员”成员从工党中开除——在对方隐藏身份的情况下，这并非易事。胆小的人指责他在进行一场“猎巫行动”。他反驳说这简直是胡说，工党的章程明确禁止这种“党中之党”的策略。他记得，他必须说服人们，“即使是最宽容的教会也有围墙，如果没有，它们最终会变成一堆瓦砾。”他最终成功了。他虽然从未担任过首相，但为托尼·布莱尔以及从1997年开始的13年工党执政铺平了道路。

退出舞台，向左

民主党不能简单地抄袭金诺模式。他们的政党权力较为分散；领导层无法阻止激进分子在初选中竞争。但他们可以借鉴工党在荒原岁月中所学到的教训：乌托邦并非真实存在，渐进主义并非背叛，而选民也不是“偶然的旁观者”。正如历史学家 R.H. 陶尼（R.H. Tawney）曾言，一个左翼政党必须不断证明“其理想主义并非疯狂”。在 20 世纪 80 年代的英国，另一种选择是一个原则坚定的保守党政府，而面对它的是一个没有实力的反对党。金诺勋爵担心，在今天的美国，这种情况可能会演变成“长期且不受阻碍的特朗普主义”。■

39

美洲

img-62.jpeg

委内瑞拉政治

真正的谈判开始

加拉加斯

美国正推动委内瑞拉走向民主

“这是不尊重，这是卑劣，这是在往他们脸上吐唾沫。”委内瑞拉那个橡皮图章般的国民议会主席豪尔赫·罗德里格斯（Jorge Rodríguez）如此描述在两次大地震袭击该国仅几周后就讨论制度改革的想法。他本该问问受害者。在废墟旁露营并希望找到兄弟遗体的弗朗西斯·里亚斯科斯（Francis Riascos）表示：“任何以任何方式削弱现政府权力的改变都是积极的。”

罗德里格斯先生也没能说服美国国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio），自从特种部队在1月份抓获独裁者尼古拉斯·马杜罗（Nicolás Maduro）以来，鲁比奥在委内瑞拉拥有巨大的影响力。在罗德里格斯先生抨击该想法三天后，他折返回来并宣布与反对派就恰恰是此类问题进行谈判。鲁比奥先生很快便显眼地赞扬了这一计划。

面对面谈判于8月6日开始。美国选择迪诺拉·菲格拉（Dinorah Figuera）领导反对派团队。她是2015年选举产生的国民议会主席，那是美国认可的最后一个委内瑞拉立法机构。另外五名谈判代表同样是来自该议会的流亡议员。政权方团队由罗德里格斯先生领导。他的妹妹德尔西·罗德里格斯（Delcy Rodríguez）是临时总统，曾是马杜罗先生的副手。

经过六天的谈判，第一轮谈判于8月12日结束，双方发表了一份承诺将开展更多工作的联合声明，并就司法改革进程达成初步协议，包括最高法院法官的新任命机制。菲格拉女士政党的资深成员保拉·包蒂斯塔·德·阿莱曼（Paola Bautista de Alemán）称其为“迈向民主的重要一步”。他们还同意共同努力，追回在英格兰银行被冻结的黄金储备，用于救助地震灾民。

这是唐纳德·特朗普政府自1月突袭以来，重塑委内瑞拉政治的首次重大尝试。直到现在，其重点一直放在尝试提升石油和矿业以造福美国企业。此次谈判存在争议。其中不包括领先的反对派人物玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多（María Corina Machado）。这个已经把持权力27年的政权，擅长确保对话不会产生实质性的改变。然而，仍有理由抱有希望。谈判议程是合理的。马查多女士目前的缺席尚在可控范围内。最重要的是，特朗普政府拥有极强的筹码。很多结果取决于其意图。

美国的影响无处不在。该政府自2月以来一直与菲格拉女士合作，并参与了在马德里旨在敲定议程的预备会议。在加拉加斯，反对派谈判团队住在万豪酒店，美国在该酒店运行其大使馆的大部分业务。该团队乘坐大使馆车辆出行，其安全由美国保证。菲格拉女士直接与鲁比奥先生讨论进展。

→ 本节其他内容

41 唐纳德·特朗普对加拿大的霸凌

41 巴西的新战舰

42 哥伦比亚的一场地震

40 美洲

特朗普政府强迫该政权坐到了谈判桌前。

现在进行谈判有充分的理由。在华盛顿，随着中期选举临近，共和党人和民主党人都要求委内瑞拉在选举问题上取得进展。此外，作为特朗普先生优先考虑的委内瑞拉石油部门并未繁荣，这使得经济稳定变得更加困难（见图表）。政府在明确新税制方面的迟缓，以及投资者对法治的怀疑，导致目前达成的石油交易寥寥无几。特朗普政府可能认为，要吸引严肃的投资，必须首先展示政治上的进展。

官方议程分为三个部分：帮助地震受害者；加强民主；以及政治权利与保障。每个领域都正在设立工作组。在加强民主方面，最重要的问题是对选举委员会和最高法院的改革。这两个机构负责运行和裁决选举——并且在 2024 年 7 月的总统选举中，它们厚颜无耻地允许马杜罗窃取选举结果，而实际上获胜的是马查多支持的候选人。

重塑民主

预计双方将就谁将进入五人选举委员会以及最高法院的选举和宪法分庭进行激烈谈判。许多反对派政治人物被禁止参选，其政党被政权收编。谈判者将就恢复这些政治权利展开争论。时间表非常紧凑。菲格拉（Ms Figuera）表示，选举委员会的改革是一项必须在12月前“交付的任务”。最高法院的截止日期是11月，而政治权利的截止日期则是10月。设定这些目标的负责人无疑是鲁比奥（Mr Rubio）。

该政权的优先级是解除制裁并获得被冻结的国家资源。这也是为什么帮助地震灾民（虽然重要但并无争议）被列入议程的部分原因。将其纳入议程可以为讨论获取离岸资金开启更广泛的空间。

《经济学人》获悉，另外两个议题至少会被讨论。政治犯的命运虽未列入正式议程，但预计将在非正式场合被提及。目前约有 380 名此类囚犯仍被关押，不过自1月以来已有约 900 人获释。第二个议题是对选举后失去权力者的保障，这是一个至关重要且困难的课题。如果罗德里格斯（Ms Rodríguez）及其核心圈子认为，输掉选举意味着将因其罪行而在监狱中腐烂，他们将竭尽全力避免做出真正的让步。

许多委内瑞拉人希望谈判能最终达成一份完整的选举时间表。但这不太可能。相反，将由新的选举委员会来制定时间表。最理想的情况是，谈判者可能会就选举达成一个宽泛的时间框架，由选举委员会进一步细化。该政权很可能会施压要求先从地方选举开始，从而推迟总统大选。

目前的谈判将极其困难。双方甚至在谈判目的上都无法达成一致。反对派认为他们是在谈判结束独裁统治；而政权则将对话视为管理一场长期、双边政治冲突的一种方式。政权内部的动态也变得更加复杂。曾在已故的查韦斯（Hugo Chávez）领导下担任委内瑞拉副总统的埃利亚斯·豪亚（Elías Jaua）对美国“财阀”对该国的“掠夺”感到愤怒。他将罗德里格斯描述为“殖民总督”，并表示委内瑞拉的政治阶层现在必须更坚定地对抗特朗普政府。他拒绝这些谈判，并希望开展涵盖委内瑞拉政治所有元素的对话。

该政权擅长拖延时间并违背承诺。这至少是自 1999 年以来的第八次正式对话，也是第 18 次发起任何形式的谈判倡议。然而，该政权依然在掌权。智库国际危机组织（International Crisis Group）驻加拉加斯的菲尔·冈森（Phil Gunson）表示，特朗普政府缺乏处理委内瑞拉问题的专业知识，且似乎在即兴发挥。令反对派沮丧的是，美国并不会始终出席双方的会议。

尽管如此，鲁比奥深切希望在委内瑞拉取得成功。他对该政权拥有巨大的权力。委内瑞拉所有的石油收入（今年迄今已超过 140亿美元）都进入了美国财政部的账户。向该政权拨付款项最终必须获得鲁比奥的批准。潜在的军事威胁同样重要。挑战一个最近抓捕了你总统的国家，与忽视在 2022 年促成最近一次谈判的挪威，是完全不同的情况。事实上，自1月3日以来，执政集团为了讨好特朗普已竭尽全力，包括强行通过一项新的石油法，引渡一名前内阁部长，并在安全问题上与美国合作。

但目前尚不清楚特朗普政府是否会利用这种杠杆来推动向民主转型。尽管鲁比奥似乎致力于推动选举，但特朗普并非如此。“德尔西（Delcy）做得非常出色，”他在7月再次热情地表示。

另一个巨大的担忧是马查多女士没有参与其中。这同样是美国的一种选择。美国政府显然认为，由于她是潜在的候选人，因此不应参与制定选举规则。政权方面也厌恶她，因此她的出现可能会增加让该政权参与谈判的难度，从而增加谈判破裂的风险。

马查多女士对谈判有着截然不同的计划。5月下旬，她在巴拿马召集了众多反对党，各方在公开场合同意由她领导谈判。美国对此不予理会。在地震发生后，她两次被阻止返回委内瑞拉，部分阻力来自特朗普政府。她目前仍留在巴拿马。

这一切也导致了反对派的分裂。菲格拉女士所在的“正义第一党”表示，他们在4月份美国计划出炉时立即通知了马查多女士。然而，马查多女士坚称，她根本没有被咨询。目前参与谈判的两家反对党政治团体，都属于5月在巴拿马同意由马查多女士领导任何谈判的阵营。一些亲近马查多女士的人正在谈论“背叛”。

缺失的马查多

“正义第一”（Justice First）急于强调，他们曾邀请马查多女士加入一个由资深人士组成、旨在指导谈判者的咨询与决策小组，但她并未接受。马查多女士目前在委内瑞拉的政党领导人亨利·阿尔维亚雷斯（Henry Alviárez）表示：“信任已经破裂。”尽管如此，马查多女士承诺不会阻碍谈判，并将根据结果来评判。

她的缺席损害了谈判的正当性。谈判仍有机会引导制度改革并开启通往选举之路，但如果马查多女士在委内瑞拉并支持谈判，她巨大的公众支持力将增加政权做出让步的压力。她的缺席对于关于失败者保障的讨论也是一个问题。在自由选举的情况下，她是最有可能的下一任总统。为了让保障具有可信度，政权必须相信她会遵守这些保障。

政权的立场是，马查多女士在法律上被禁止参选。她的支持者担心，特朗普政府可能会出于认为这样能缓解过渡压力的想法而纵容这一点。马查多女士本人愤怒地拒绝了这一想法。

这种勾结似乎不太可能发生。然而，就像在委内瑞拉发生的许多事情一样，这取决于鲁比奥先生，尤其是取决于特朗普先生。■

马杜罗走了，通胀还在

委内瑞拉，消费者价格，较上月增长百分比

img-63.jpeg

来源：委内瑞拉中央银行

美洲 41

加拿大 vs 美国

步子迈得太大

渥太华

马克·卡尼对唐纳德·特朗普的务实应对是正确的，但并不受欢迎

戈迪·豪国际大桥（GORDIE HOWE International Bridge）是一座 2.5km-long 的纪念碑，记录了安抚唐纳德·特朗普所带来的危险。为了在底特律河上修建这座通往美国的崭新大桥，加拿大承担了全部 64 亿加元 (46亿美元) 的费用。但美国总统曾数月威胁要阻止其开放，直到美国获得一部分过路费收入后才勉强同意。交通终于在7月下旬开始畅通。面对这次敲诈，马克·卡尼（Mark Carney）含糊其辞的解释让加拿大人感到尴尬。随后，特朗普通过宣布对从其北方邻国进口的一系列商品征收 50% 的新关税，以此“奖赏”了他的顺从。

如果新关税如期在8月19日生效，加拿大将成为第一个根据 1930, 通过的《斯穆特-霍利关税法》（Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act）第 338 条被征收关税的国家，该条款允许美国总统对感知到的贸易歧视做出回应。与今年2月被美国最高法院推翻的紧急关税不同，该法案下的关税无需国会批准。华盛顿贸易咨询公司 Rideau Potomac Strategy Group 的负责人埃里克·米勒（Eric Miller）表示：“这看起来非常像唐纳德·特朗普贸易政策的未来，因为它给了他灵活性。”

特朗普正利用这种自由，对价值 200亿美元 的对美出口商品征收关税，这占每年向南出口总额的 5%。这些关税将与此前削弱加拿大汽车、钢铁、铝、木材和铜工业的其他关税叠加。至关重要的是，与去年实施的紧急关税不同，新关税还波及到了《北美贸易协定》（USMCA）涵盖的商品。

卡尼先生可能认为自己仍有谈判空间。他确实需要这个空间。他去年当选的部分原因是他敢于对抗特朗普，并承诺要达成一份比 USMCA “更好的协议”。然而，接踵而至的是一次又一次的让步。加拿大取消了主要针对美国社交媒体巨头的数字服务税，随后取消了大部分报复性关税，以及一项针对 Netflix 等流媒体平台的税收。特朗普的回应则是漠不关心。在7月28日与墨西哥及加拿大就 USMCA 进行谈判之前，他说：“我们不需要它们。协议对他们很重要，对我们并不重要。”

这种霸凌行为似乎在损害卡尼在国内的声望，尤其是戈迪·豪大桥带来的尴尬。加拿大在 2012 年同意出资修建这座大桥，前提是在成本回收之前，加拿大将获得所有过路费收入。在特朗普强制执行新协议后，卡尼多次声称加拿大的成本仍将优先偿还。

美国商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克（Howard Lutnick）的一条得意推文表明，这并非事实。在运营的前 15 年里，美国将在扣除运营成本但尚未偿还债务之前，拿走净收入的一半。这将使加拿大损失约 C3亿美元。根据民调机构 Angus Reid 的数据，在4月至7月期间，认为卡尼能与特朗普达成良好协议的加拿大人比例下降了8个百分点。

同一项民调显示，加拿大人仍对特朗普的关税感到愤怒；近三分之二的人希望卡尼采取报复性关税。但这只会增加加拿大的痛苦。密歇根大学的贾斯汀·沃尔弗斯（Justin Wolfers）表示：“你必须意识到，在这里反击霸凌者，同样是在重击加拿大人民的腹部。”卡尼已派遣谈判代表前往华盛顿，以加强关于延长 USMCA 的讨论。特朗普的团队在7月初拒绝了这一请求；但仍有他可能同意的机会。卡尼表示，他不会通过打出加拿大最强的一张牌——限制能源出口——来进行报复。

1930年，加拿大并没有表现出像卡尼先生那样程度的克制。它对《斯穆特-霍利关税法》采取了先发制人的报复，在该法案甚至尚未成为法律之前，就对美国进口商品启动了自身的关税。许多其他国家也采取了报复行动。在四年之内，世界贸易的名义价值下降了三分之二，全球经济大萧条跌至谷底。

尽管这令人不快，但加拿大人应当希望卡尼先生的决心能够维持。而其他所有人则必须希望，当特朗普先生将新的关税转向他们时，其他世界领导人也能同样勇敢。■

巴西海军

终于开始自行造船

在经历多次失败后，该国正采购更多国产武器

在过去的几十年里，巴西的海军造船努力大多无疾而终（就一艘航空母舰而言，为了掩盖其无用之处而将其凿沉，这在字面意义上是“沉没且无迹可寻”）。自20世纪70年代以来，该国至少启动并放弃了三个战舰计划。但在今年4月，它交付了一艘新的护卫舰级舰艇——“塔曼达雷”号（Tamandaré），这是四艘完全在巴西建造的舰艇中的第一艘。第二批四艘舰艇的建造已初步达成协议。该舰能够探测潜艇并发射导弹和鱼雷。直升机停机坪使其能够在无需昂贵驱逐舰编队的情况下巡逻大片海域。对于任何海军来说，这种舰艇都会是得力的主力。

德国造船公司蒂森克虏伯海洋系统（TKMS）同意与巴西的航空航天巨头巴西航空工业公司（Embraer）合作，在南部圣卡塔琳娜州的伊塔雅伊（Itajaí）建造这些舰艇。对于一个缺乏军事强国声誉的国家来说，其生产的成功是一次巨大的进步。巴西此前一直使用20世纪建造的欧洲二手护卫舰。该项目的结构旨在鼓励国内供应链并培养当地的技术劳动力。该国此前曾在国内建造过一些小型战舰，但“塔曼达雷”级是一个巨大的飞跃。▶

特朗普的另一个扼制点

42 美洲

这一成功标志着一项更广泛的加强国防的努力。就GDP占比而言，巴西的军费支出在30年里一直持平或下降。目前该比例为1.1%。这一数字将会上升。巴西去年在武装部队上花费了240亿美元，比2024年增加了13%。除了新护卫舰外，它还计划建造核动力潜艇，这将是某个非核国家首次实现。2022年，政府订购了19架战术和加油飞机。今年3月，它揭晓了第一架在巴西组装的超音速战斗机——一架与瑞典萨博（Saab）公司合作建造的“格里芬”（Gripen）喷气式战斗机。

整个拉丁美洲的政府都在增加国防支出。例如，秘鲁和哥伦比亚在过去一年中都下了价值数十亿美元的战斗机订单，秘鲁订购了美国F-16，哥伦比亚订购了瑞典“格里芬”。

人们很容易得出结论，增加国防支出以及希望在国内制造，是由于拉丁美洲地缘政治的转变。今年7月，巴西政府表示，“存在美国军事力量被用于攻击巴西领土的风险。”这是指近期发生的事件，例如1月份委内瑞拉独裁者尼古拉斯·马杜罗（Nicolás Maduro）被捕，以及美国对涉嫌在加勒比海和东太平洋从事毒品走私的船只发起的轰炸行动。随着美国采取更具威胁性的姿态，该半球的国家希望拥有更强大的手段来自卫，或许也就不足为奇了。

早已焦虑

但全球智库国际战略研究所（IISS）的路易斯·贝尔恩（Louis Bearne）表示，巴西的支出是“长期趋势的延续”。他认为，这次扩张是一项迟到的现代化计划，而非针对任何特定威胁（包括来自美国的威胁）而做出的反应。建造“塔曼达雷”级（Tamandaré-class）护卫舰的计划于2017年启动。与萨博（Saab）公司开发格里芬（Gripen）战斗机的谅解备忘录最早签署于2013年。这两项计划都早于当前与美国的紧张关系。近期的努力仅仅是在一系列失败尝试之后的结果。

巴西的成功有助于为未来增加国内国防采购提供理由。政府渴望在本土制造更多军事和海军硬件。其最初的动机是提振巴西的工业。现在的问题是，巴西能否维持现有计划及其所需的额外支出。贝尔恩先生表示，成功应当能保护护卫舰项目免于被削减。即使巴西在10月的选举后更换政府，一个新的右翼政府也不太可能破坏一个稳固的国防制造基地。目前，该项目似乎运行平稳。■

哥伦比亚地震

两个国家的寓言

基布多（QUIBDÓ）

对悲剧的不均衡响应

“他们救出了活人，”一名围观者阿尔伯托（Alberto）说道，此时挖掘机的钢齿正砸进一堆混凝土中。这里曾是一栋四层建筑，位于乔科省（Chocó）的基布多市，该市靠近8月10日袭击哥伦比亚的7.4级地震的震中。余震导致更多建筑倒塌。在全国范围内，至少有265人死亡。

这次地震的强度与6月摧毁委内瑞拉的那次致命双震相当。但它发生在地壳深处约十倍的位置，从而减轻了其破坏力。至关重要的是，哥伦比亚政府的反应比委内瑞拉政权快得多。在震前三天刚宣誓就任总统的阿贝拉尔多·德·拉·埃斯普里埃拉（Abelardo de la Espriella）立即掌控了局面。

然而，这次地震依然凸显了当地的贫困。乔科省是哥伦比亚最贫穷的省份。基布多的医院是唯一能提供基础手术的地方。土匪敲诈贫困人口，其中75%是非裔哥伦比亚人，13%是原住民。阿尔伯托抱怨缺乏机械设备：“市政府的情况很糟糕，”他说。救援队在11日上午开始工作，但地震后被认为能救人的72小时黄金窗口期已经过去。在从废墟中救出的三人中，两人已经死亡。阿尔伯托说，乔科省的人们被“国家抛弃了”。

这与较富裕的邻近地区考卡山谷省（Valle del Cauca）的救援工作形成鲜明对比。在省会卡利（Cali），已有88人获救，且有来自首都波哥大的专家团队被派往那里。与偏远的乔科省不同，救援物资可以通过陆路运送到受灾严重的马尼萨莱斯（Manizales）和佩雷拉（Pereira），目前这两个城市记录的死亡人数超过总数的一半（乔科省的人们可能受益于居住在传统的木屋中）。

德·拉·埃斯普里埃拉先生似乎意识到了这些差距。他的内阁成员已被派遣到受灾最严重的地区。在基布多发表讲话时，他表示受害者将获得临时住房援助。然而，许多家庭在疑惑这些援助在哪里。“我们没有水，没有电，什么都没有，”罗莎·梅赛德斯（Rosa Mercedes）盯着她在基布多被毁的公寓说道。“没有人来问我们发生了什么，没有人来问我们怎么样了，”她说。

现实的打击

哥伦比亚的新任总统还面临着如何支付地震灾后重建资金的问题。他已宣布进入经济紧急状态，允许他通过法令支出国家预算，从而绕过国会。他的新政府继承了自然灾害响应关键机构的一团乱麻。国家灾害风险管理部门在过去几年被腐败的政治家和官员洗劫后，目前资金匮乏。有些人谈到，该国人民遭受的苦难可能与 1999 年那场导致约 1,230 名哥伦比亚人死亡的地震时一样严重。

这次地震迫使德拉埃斯普里埃拉先生（Mr de la Espriella）变得比他在竞选承诺中所暗示的更加务实。他此前曾誓言要远离波哥大，因为那里是他所谓的“一成不变”的精英阶层所在地。但他谈到要改为在自己的家乡巴兰基亚（Barranquilla）管理事务——该市位于地震袭击地的国家另一端——现在看来就更加不明智了。因为只有在首都，才能接触到各部委、大型媒体机构或国际合作伙伴。

此外，他还在为自己愚蠢地拒绝配合前政府发起的交接程序而付出代价。前内政部副部长路易斯·埃内斯托·戈麦斯（Luis Ernesto Gómez）表示，那是一个“愚蠢的民粹主义想法”。在社交媒体上诋毁他的左翼前任古斯塔沃·佩特罗（Gustavo Petro）很受欢迎。而反复无常的佩特罗本人发帖的激烈程度——如果非要比较的话——甚至更高。

这意味着新政府缺乏迫切需要的信息和能力。行政部门不得不主要通过地方政府采取行动。这在像咖啡种植区和考卡山谷省（Valle del Cauca）这样较富裕的地方勉强可行。而在基布多（Quibdó），梅赛德斯女士仍在等待。■

43

中东与非洲

img-66.jpeg

索马里

从灰烬中重生

摩加迪沙

摩加迪沙不再以致命暴力著称

六年前的一个傍晚，年轻的公务员萨金·阿卜迪（Saakin Abdi）在摩加迪沙市中心享用着冰淇淋。在那个时候，居住在索马里首都意味着你必须时刻意识到，自己随时可能成为“青年党”（al-Shabab）的下一个受害者——该组织是基地组织最富有且最致命的附属机构。第二天晚上，阿卜迪女士的一位朋友就在同一家冰淇淋店里，当时一名武装分子冲进门内并自爆。她的朋友和其他六人丧生。在2020年该市因青年党袭击而死亡的至少320人中，就包括他们。

自从20世纪90年代索马里中央政府崩溃以来，摩加迪沙就成了暴力的代名词。然而，近年来这里经历了一场悄然的变革。在哈桑·谢赫·穆罕默德（Hassan Sheikh Mohamud）就任总统的2022年第三季度，该市遭受的青年党袭击次数为144次，而到今年第二季度，这一数字已降至仅5次。监测组织“武装冲突地点与事件数据项目”（ACLED）收集的数据表明，2026年摩加迪沙与青年党相关的死亡人数有望创下该组织在21世纪初出现以来的最低记录（见次页图表）。

“这是哈桑·谢赫·穆罕默德政府最大的成就，”智库国际危机组织（ICG）的奥马尔·马哈茂德（Omar Mahmood）表示。阿卜迪女士回忆道，居民们过去习惯于在天黑后避免出门，因为“青年党，或者那些与青年党作战的人，可能会杀了你”。如今，数十家新咖啡馆营业至午夜以后，挤满了在TikTok和Instagram上发布视频的索马里年轻人。7月1日，穆罕默德先生在摩加迪沙一个最常被袭击的十字路口发表了前所未有的公开演讲，以此纪念索马里的独立日。今年早些时候，他曾在西南州政府所在地拜多亚（Baidoa）经历了一次包括在内的多次暗杀企图并幸存下来。数百人加入了他的演讲现场。

这与2010年代后期相比发生了显著变化。一名索马里国会议员回忆道，那时“我们早上出门时，永远不知道能否活着回家”。一名官员表示，他在2014年加入政府后，在六次不同的爆炸中幸存。2017年的一起卡车炸弹袭击事件造成近600人死亡。

安全状况改善的成果显而易见。“商业正在繁荣，”商务部长加马尔·哈桑（Gamal Hassan）说道。新建筑正以惊人的速度拔地而起。尤其是机场周边的区域，密度增长明显。达哈布大厦（Dahab Tower）是一座包含豪华公寓、购物中心、健身房和清真寺的26层综合建筑，预计将于今年开业。它坐落在1993年两名美国士兵尸体被拖过街道的地点附近，当时民兵击落了一架黑鹰直升机。附近是Beydan Coffee，这是一家由一名2010年代从瑞典回国的索马里人创立的、蓬勃发展的泛非连锁店。

至于袭击减少的原因则较不

→ 本节其他内容

  • 44 赞比亚由铜矿驱动的选举
  • 45 埃及、约旦与伊朗战争
  • 46 一项新的沙特主导的国防协议
  • 47 陷入困境的穆斯林兄弟会

44 中东与非洲

摩加迪沙的漫长之路

索马里，摩加迪沙由青年党（al-Shabab）发起的袭击造成的死亡人数*

▶ 显而易见。政府自豪地宣称，用一名前情报官员的话来说，它已经向青年党“完全关闭了大门”。国际危机组织（ICG）的马哈茂德（Mr Mahmood）将此归功于一些“平凡”的措施，例如监控摄像头的普及，以及警方使用iPad配备的电子数据库，用于在检查站识别平民车辆。大量便衣情报人员已被部署。

土耳其作为穆罕默德（Mr Mohamud）政府最坚定的外国支持者，发挥了重要作用。在被问及安全状况改善的原因时，一名驻摩加迪沙的西方外交官表示：“是土耳其人。”在土耳其总统雷杰普·塔伊普·埃尔多安（Recep Tayyip Erdogan）的领导下，土耳其已成为索马里最重要的投资者，其商业利益包括机场和港口、一个新的航天港以及近海油气勘探，所有这些都集中在首都或其周边。自土耳其于2017年在摩加迪沙开设其最大的海外军事基地以来，其军队一直培训索马里士兵，进行无人机袭击，并与索马里国民军共同开展针对青年党的行动。

这种做法在多大程度上削弱了首都以外的青年党尚不清楚。自唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）于2025年重返办公室以来，土耳其和索马里在摩加迪沙以外进行的空袭，伴随着索马里历史上最密集的美国空中行动。然而，联邦政府的领土控制范围在18个月内几乎没有变动。摩加迪沙的大部分腹地仍处于青年党的控制之下。

一些分析人士怀疑该组织可能在刻意克制。“青年党本身改变了其战略和战术，”摩加迪沙城市大学的阿菲亚雷·阿卜迪·埃尔米（Afyare Abdi Elmi）认为。在首都减少大规模伤亡袭击可能是为了软化其形象。青年党正从一种现状中获益，在这种现状下，它在首都勒索企业基本上不受限制。目前，它可能认为没有理由升级袭击。

然而，有几个理由让人对这种平静产生怀疑。首先是总统与其对手之间关于推迟选举的僵局。6月，军队与两名反对派领导人相关的民兵之间发生了短暂冲突，造成至少13人死亡。

更令人担忧的是总统与索马里各地区州之间不断升级的对抗。3月，穆罕默德向拜多亚（Baidoa）派遣军队以罢免州长。最近几周，他一直试图动员地方力量对抗北部邦特兰州（Puntland）的领导层。前国防官员艾哈迈德·科辛（Ahmed Koshin）在谈到穆罕默德政府时说：“他们在2022年针对青年党的行动开局良好，但此后他们将国家资源投入到了政治内斗中。”

这些资源正在萎缩。7月1日，美国表示将不再支持UNSOS（联合国支持索马里特派团），该机构是负责向自2007年以来支撑联邦政府的非盟维和部队提供物资的联合国后勤机构。欧洲消息人士称，欧盟将不会填补这一缺口，使维和任务陷入困境。马哈茂德认为，如果没有替代方案，该任务最早可能在2027年崩溃。

索马里官员似乎很有信心，认为该国处于红海两个入口之一的战略位置，意味着外国合作伙伴不会完全撤出。圣战分子接管摩加迪沙的可能性仍然很低。但要打破这种新建立的安全感，所需的触发因素要少得多。“你永远不知道，”阿卜迪女士说，“有时感觉事情可能会回到原点。” ■

赞比亚的选举

继续挖掘

基特韦

铜价高企是该国的福音，但选民希望有所感知

在赞比亚铜带省的基特韦，无论以何种方式，每个人都在耕耘土地。在创纪录的铜价推动下（见图表），当地的矿山已恢复运营。但这对于在屋外给洋葱除草的妇女们来说意义不大。“我们不知道他们把钱拿去哪里了，”其中一人指着矿山大门说道。从历史上看，赞比亚的经济增长转化为贫困减少的速率比世界上几乎任何其他地方都要低。

当选民在8月13日投票选举总统时，生活成本必然在他们的考虑之中。尽管通货膨胀率在下降，夸查（kwacha）也在走强，但许多人仍感到物价高昂带来的负担。这种挫败感为主要挑战者布赖恩·蒙杜比莱（Brian Mundubile）的竞选注入了活力，他将自己描述为那些心灰意冷的年轻人的“兄长”。现任总统、国家发展统一党（UPND）的哈卡因德·希奇莱马（Hakainde Hichilema）可能拥有足够的支。

财富增长

铜，每公吨 000 加元

img-68.jpeg

获得连任的支持（结果预计将于 8 月 17 日公布）。但他也利用自己曾经谴责过的手段，使竞争环境向有利于自己的方向倾斜。

希奇莱马先生在 2021. 年获胜之前，曾在反对派中度过了多年，并面临伪造的叛国罪指控。作为赞比亚最富有的商人之一，他将自己塑造为解决经济危机的关键人物。他的政府重组了无法偿还的债务，削减了补贴，增加了储备，并让国际货币基金组织（IMF）感到满意。政府还降低了铜工业的税单，而铜工业占出口额的三分之二。赞比亚矿业商会首席执行官索克瓦尼·奇莱姆博（Sokwani Chilembo）赞许地表示，这些改革已使我们“为增长做好了准备”。

这种增长速度低于政府承诺的水平。到 2031 年每年生产 300 万吨的雄心勃勃的目标肯定无法实现（去年的产量约为 890,000 吨）。这并非因为缺乏买家。中国正在翻修一条通往印度洋的铁路。西方国家则在支持一条通往大西洋的运输走廊。赞比亚不想选边站队，并拒绝了美国试图将矿产获取与医疗援助挂钩的尝试。财政部长西图姆贝科·穆索科特瓦内（Situmbeko Musokotwane）表示：“常识就是不要把所有鸡蛋放在一个篮子里。”

既然铜的需求如此之大，能否将更多收益留在国内？许多赞比亚人认为可以。有人指称希奇莱马先生对外国拥有的矿业公司态度软弱，是因为他秘密接受了这些公司的资助（其助手和矿业公司对此予以否认）。他取消了公立学校的费用，并向地方政府分配了更多资金，这两项举措都非常受欢迎，但他仍难以摆脱其精英主义的形象。

在其他方面，他发生了转变：那个曾在牢房中为赞比亚民主挺身而出的男人，现在正从国家府邸削弱民主。镇压手段虽然不像 2010 年代爱国阵线（PF）政府时期那样粗暴（当时赞比亚开始陷入威权主义），但那时在市场和巴士站勒索路人的干部已经消失。

中东与非洲 45

► 取而代之的是，公民担心在 Facebook 上发布一条批评帖子可能会导致根据网络犯罪法被逮捕。压力团体“第一章”（Chapter One）的约西亚·卡拉拉（Josiah Kalala）表示：“机构的运作方式仍然像在 PF 时期那样。”

由于内部的分裂和国家干预，PF 本身没有派出候选人。前 PF 政治人物蒙杜比莱先生在新的品牌下凝聚了旧追随者。在竞选过程中，他遭到 UPND 支持者的投石阻挠；他表示一些支持者被逮捕了。他的支持主要来自北部和东部。而希奇莱马先生的支持则来自南部和西部。主要战场在城镇，那里的族群纽带较弱。

赞比亚的民主仍有生命力，出现意外并非不可能。无论谁获胜，都需要为长期存在的经济问题寻找答案。近三分之二的赞比亚人每天生活费低于 $2.15；全球只有五个国家的贫困率更高，而这些国家要么处于冲突之中，要么可用资金少得多。在经历了两年丰收后，厄尔尼诺现象的回归现在带来了干旱的威胁。上一次发生这种情况是在 2024, 低入水量导致水电站每天仅能供电几个小时。下一任总统的任务是将铜矿繁荣的影响延伸到矿区大门之外。■

埃及与约旦

夹缝中的人们

迪拜

海湾战争削弱了美国的两个阿拉伯盟友

近两年前，约旦国王阿卜杜拉告诉伊朗外交部长阿巴斯·阿拉格奇，他的国家不会成为“地区冲突的战场”。而十年前，在竞选埃及总统期间，塞西向海湾国家做出了截然相反的承诺：如果他们的安全受到威胁，埃及将“近在咫尺”。

然而今天，约旦正处于美国（其最亲密的盟友）与阿拉格奇政府之间地区冲突的中心。至于埃及，它可能确实“近在咫尺”——但它就停留在那里没有动弹。尽管海湾地区面临 35 年来最大的威胁，但塞西除了口头承诺外几乎没有提供任何实质帮助。

这些失效的承诺揭示了深层问题。约旦正在为一场它几乎无法控制的战争付出代价。埃及作为调解者和军事强国的地位已被边缘化。长期以来，这两个国家一直将自己标榜为地区秩序的支柱。但现在，这个秩序看起来摇摇欲坠，而这两个国家则显得迷失方向。

img-69.jpeg

从资产变为负债

约旦被更强大的邻国包围且缺乏自然资源，因此将与美国的密切关系视为生存之钥。作为回报，美国使其成为对外援助的最大接收国之一。数千名美国军队部署在如穆瓦法格·萨尔蒂（见图）等空军基地，这些基地驻扎着战斗机、空中加油机和其他对伊朗战争至关重要的战机。

接纳这些军队使约旦成为了伊朗的目标。这在当地也不受欢迎。数百名政治人物、退役军官和其他约旦名流最近签署了一封公开信，要求美国军队撤离。然而，国王无法承受顺从这一要求的代价。去年，约旦接收了超过 16亿美元 的美国援助（占 GDP 的 3%）。本月，美国又承诺提供 3.55亿美元。

随着战争打击其经济，约旦需要这笔资金。导弹袭击迫使航班取消并吓跑了游客；本已被加沙战争重创的旅游收入再次下降。约旦一半的电力依赖于来自以色列的天然气。战争开始时，以色列担心其钻井平台遭到伊朗袭击，暂停了出口。这迫使约旦转向使用柴油、重燃料油和液化天然气现货。尽管出口在 4 月恢复，但国际货币基金组织（IMF）预计，约旦的能源进口账单将比 2025 年高出 36%。

伊朗试图深化国王与公众之间的裂痕。即便其导弹和无人机袭击该王国，它仍声称对约旦人民“没有敌意”，并称是美国而非伊朗“侵犯了你们的领土完整”。此类呼吁可能难以奏效：许多约旦人将伊朗视为威胁。尽管如此，对于一个正与国内不满情绪作斗争的政府来说，这场战争是一个两难困境。

埃及的经济支撑得更好。预计今年将增长 4.6%。国际货币基金组织（IMF）刚刚释放了一项四年期贷款协议中最新的 18亿美元 份额。占就业人数 13% 的旅游业依然强劲。今年上半年，超过 900 万人访问埃及，比 2025 年同期增长 3%。

乍一看，埃及其他主要的外汇来源——苏伊士运河收入和侨汇——似乎也很稳健。前者在 2026, 上半年增长至 24亿美元，高于 2025. 同期的 18亿美元。后者在截至 6 月的一年里达到了历史最高点。然而，这两者都可能是滞后指标。伊朗支持的红海航运袭击可能会削弱运河收入。至于侨汇，很大一部分来自海湾地区的埃及人。如果那里出现长期衰退，意味着发送资金的工人会减少。与此同时，政府已将部分电费提高了 12%。

但就目前而言，埃及最大的弱点在于地位而非偿债能力。在2023年10月7日哈马斯领导的以色列大屠杀之后，塞西先生成为了各方争抢的对象。由于拥有共同边界，他的情报部门负责人与加沙的哈马斯领导层有着长期的关系。美国前国务卿安东尼·布林肯在大屠杀后的一年内访问了埃及七次，除以色列外，比访问任何其他国家的次数都多。停火的最终谈判于2025年10月在埃及度假胜地沙姆沙伊赫举行。

在与伊朗的战争中，埃及的影响力则低得多。作为调解人的角色，它已被巴基斯坦、土耳其和海湾国家所掩盖。尽管自塞西先生在2013年通过政变夺权以来，海湾国家向埃及提供了数百亿加元的援助，但这个阿拉伯世界最大的军队在保卫邻国方面并未发挥太大作用。

开罗的官员辩称，海湾国家正从其他盟友那里获得帮助，且埃及的边境面临着其他威胁。►

46 中东与非洲

► 尽管如此，埃及的不作为仍令其盟友恼火。今年3月，阿拉伯联合酋长国（UAE）总统外交顾问安瓦尔·加尔加什抱怨一些“主要”阿拉伯国家无所作为。他质问道：“在困难时期，你们今天在哪里？”

埃及确实向阿联酋部署了一个阵风战斗机中队——尽管直到5月才宣布此事，而此时美国与伊朗之间的初步停火协议已经生效一个月。在8月7日沙特阿拉伯与巴基斯坦及土耳其签署共同防御协议时，埃及明显缺席，尽管沙特官员暗示其以后可能会加入。然而，远离战争并未为其带来保护。上个月，一架无人机袭击了位于埃及地中海沿岸达米埃塔的一处天然气设施。

这一三方协议揭示了中东未来的一个缩影。由于担心不能再依赖美国，地区国家将需要为自身的防御承担更多责任。对于埃及和约旦来说，这将是一个令人不安的处境。■

中东的联盟

三人成众

伊斯坦布尔与耶路撒冷

如何看待新的沙特主导的国防协议

一个拥有北约第二大军队和蓬勃发展的国防部门。另一个是穆斯林世界唯一的核大国。第三个则是全球第八大武器支出国。难怪土耳其、巴基斯坦和沙特阿拉伯在 8 月 7 日签署国防协议时引起了轰动，尤其是当官员们表示该协议包含类似于北约第 5 条的共同防御条款时。巴基斯坦外交部表示：“任何针对这三个国家中任何一个的武装袭击，都将被视为对所有国家的袭击。”

这三个强国强调，欢迎其他地区强国加入该协议，并否认了关于正在形成一个逊尼派军事集团的猜测。但在签署仪式上，宗教象征意义被浓墨重彩地渲染，出席人员包括土耳其总统雷杰普·塔伊普·埃尔多安、巴基斯坦总理谢巴兹·谢里夫，以及他们的东道主——沙特王储穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼（见图）。仪式并非在沙特首都利雅得举行，而是在伊斯兰教最神圣的城市麦加举行。随后，三位领导人在该市的大清真寺祈祷。

该协议的目的之一是作为制衡以色列影响力的手段。以色列在加沙、黎巴嫩、叙利亚和伊朗接连开展军事行动，在卡塔尔袭击并杀害哈马斯谈判代表，以及人们感觉到以色列对地区主导权的渴望尚未满足，这些都引发了整个中东的警觉。这种担忧在土耳其最为强烈，一些以色列政治家和官员将土耳其描述为与伊朗同级别的威胁。

应对来自伊朗本身的威胁是另一个关键目标。尽管受到严重削弱，但伊朗政权已证明，在遭受攻击时，它有能力在整个地区（尤其是海湾地区）制造混乱。它还通过干扰霍尔木兹海峡的航运，展示了其掌握的巨大影响力。与埃尔多安政府关系密切的智库 SETA 的负责人穆拉特·耶希尔塔什（Murat Yesiltas）表示：“利用霍尔木兹海峡对抗地区国家已成为伊朗新战略的支柱之一。”耶希尔塔什说，三个签署国“不会将伊朗作为目标”，“但他们希望展示集体威慑力”。伊朗则表示，没有理由担心该协议。

该协议还反映出人们对美国优先事项及其安全保证可信度的日益担忧。土耳其与其他北约成员国一样，担心美国可能会从欧洲和中东这两个地区进一步撤出。在伊朗使美国帮助在海湾地区部署的防空伞出现巨大漏洞后，沙特对美国的信心受到了打击。

以色列政府尚未对该协议的消息做出公开回应，但该消息在以色列引起了沮丧。以色列已经将土耳其和巴基斯坦视为敌对势力，并对两国领导人与美国总统唐纳德·特朗普之间培养的亲密关系感到不满。该协议还凸显了以色列与沙特阿拉伯之间实现关系正常化的前景依然遥远。一名以色列外交官表示：“这将不得不等到以色列出现新政府为止，而且即便到那时，也需要时间。”

协议签署国中任何一方实际代表其他方进行干预的可能性似乎很小。如果与印度爆发战争，沙特阿拉伯和土耳其不会出面救援巴基斯坦；如果伊朗向沙特阿拉伯发射导弹，巴基斯坦或土耳其也不会做出同样的回应。耶希尔塔什表示，目前该协议与其说是一个强有力的军事联盟，不如说是一个安全与国防合作平台。沙特阿拉伯雄厚的财力和采购需求，土耳其的国防部门以及巴基斯坦的军工基础，构成了一个强有力的组合。尤其是土耳其的国防科技公司正对此充满期待。土耳其无人机制造商 Baykar 在 2023 年与沙特阿拉伯签署了一份具有里程碑意义的合同。巴基斯坦在去年与印度的冲突中使用了土耳其的无人机。

但土耳其渴望获得更多。其国防项目，包括名为 KAAN 的国产战斗机、新型“钢穹”（Steel Dome）防空系统以及远程弹道导弹，预计将耗资数百亿美元。土耳其的经济深受通货膨胀之苦，且通胀率持续维持在 30% 以上，无法独自承担这一成本。土耳其分析师卡格拉尔·库尔奇（Caglar Kurc）表示，沙特阿拉伯的国防合同和投资将对资助这些计划大有帮助。这或许正是《麦加协议》产生初步回报的地方。■

img-70.jpeg

麦加的盟友

中东与非洲 47

img-71.jpeg

政治伊斯兰

虽陷低谷，但未出局

贝鲁特

中东地区的穆斯林兄弟会虽在衰落，但仍未消亡

今年夏天，位于突尼斯边缘的莫纳古亚监狱（Mornaguia prison）内部温度攀升至 50℃ 以上。7月17日，受穆斯林兄弟会启发而成立的突尼斯政党“复兴党”（Ennahda）的 85 岁创始人拉希德·加努希（Rachid Ghannouchi）在牢房中昏迷。他的故事似乎注定会像穆罕默德·穆尔西（Muhammad Morsi）那样结束——后者是 2012 年当选埃及总统的兄弟会人物，最终于 2019 年死在狱中。

加努希先生的命运说明了其意识形态同志在中东地区影响力下降的现状。十五年前，与兄弟会相关的政党曾掌控埃及的总统之位，并在突尼斯议会中占据多数席位。其凯旋的信息通过卡塔尔广受欢迎的半岛电视台（Al Jazeera）传播给阿拉伯大众。该组织似乎是 2010 年底在突尼斯爆发并于 2011 年传遍阿拉伯世界的“阿拉伯之春”的早期赢家。

但独裁政权很快重新确立了统治。在随后的几年里，兄弟会的领导人们被监禁或流亡海外。过去一年尤其艰难。去年11月，唐纳德·特朗普指示其政府将该组织的各个分支指定为恐怖组织。1月13日，该政府将埃及和约旦分支列为“全球恐怖分子”，理由是它们援助了从兄弟会巴勒斯坦分支演变而来的哈马斯；而黎巴嫩分支则被正式认定为“外国恐怖”组织。5月，在美国一项新的反恐战略下，兄弟会与基地组织和伊斯兰国一起被列为现代圣战主义的源头。约旦在 2025 年 4 月完全禁止了该组织，此后还限制了其政治翼机构——伊斯兰行动阵线（Islamic Action Front）。

目前尚不清楚美国针对的是这个四分五裂的兄弟会的哪个部分。自 2021 年以来，该组织出现了两个主要派系：当时在伦敦流亡领导该组织的易卜拉欣·穆尼尔（Ibrahim Munir）解散了其在土耳其的结构，而该运动的总书记马哈茂德·侯赛因（Mahmoud Hussein）则声称穆尼尔本人已被罢免。现在，每个派系都有自己的领导人、自己的舒拉会议（Shura council）和自己的网站；且每个派系都坚持认为只有自己才是正统。

在穆尼尔先生于 2022 年去世后接管其派系的萨拉赫·阿卜杜勒·哈克（Salah Abdel Haq）承诺，将在美国法院对美国的认定提出质疑。但位于伊斯坦布尔的分支则表示，它不认为其母组织有资格代表任何人做出回应。即便面临生存危机，这两个半部分仍无法统一发声。

土耳其分支的侯赛因先生控制着房产、土耳其的投资公司以及现金，而阿卜杜勒·哈克先生则声称管理着这个跨国组织，但几乎没有什么实际成果。前成员已敦促两人放弃政治，回归传教。

在埃及这个该运动的祖辈核心地带，其执政时期正被从官方记忆中抹除。该运动在埃及的“最高指南”穆罕默德·巴迪（Muhammad Badie）身在狱中。在宗教节日期间，总统阿卜杜勒·法塔赫·塞西（Abdel Fattah al-Sisi）会发布特赦令——但很少涉及兄弟会成员。他关闭了曾经维持其福利计划的企业。突尼斯总统凯斯·赛义德（Qais Saeed）则在效仿塞西先生，将加努希先生投入监狱。

在加沙，以色列已将作为其密切意识形态伙伴的哈马斯击碎在地中海的沙滩上。其领土几乎被摧毁，而以色列的特种小队正在整个地区追捕哈马斯的领导人。尽管哈马斯仍在苦撑，但其权力已大幅萎缩。许多加沙人已对其产生反感。

叙利亚是另一个令人感到屈辱的地方。当阿萨德政权在2024年倒台时，夺取大马士革的是逊尼派圣战分子，而非穆斯林兄弟会。兄弟会在战争期间犹豫不决，结果发现自己被那些真正参与战斗的人抢占了先机。在叙利亚的新议会中，该组织几乎销声匿迹。总统艾哈迈德·沙拉（Ahmed al-Sharaa）的一位具有长期兄弟会背景的顾问艾哈迈德·泽丹（Ahmed Zeidan）建议，其叙利亚分支应当自行解散。叙利亚伊斯兰组织专家阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·哈吉（Abdulrahman al-Haj）在为半岛电视台（Al Jazeera）撰文时认为，政治伊斯兰在新的叙利亚中已不再那么重要。

或许如此。但长期以来，将穆斯林兄弟会排除在考虑之外是不明智的。它在1948年被解散，并在1954年再次被埃及领导人加末·阿卜杜勒·纳赛尔（Gamel Abdel Nasser）镇压。其首席理论家赛义德·库特卜（Sayyid Qutb）于1966年被处以绞刑。在接下来的四十年里，该组织大部分时间处于被禁状态，但其追随者在2005年仍获得了埃及议会的88个席位，并在2012年的民主选举后赢得了总统之位。“他们非常擅长在风暴中生存，”一名在该地区的西方情报官员表示。

镇压可以在官方层面抹除这个组织，但它无法消除人们加入该组织的原因。在埃及，这些原因依然尖锐。该国糟糕的经济依赖于国际货币基金组织（IMF）的援助和海湾国家的存款。其年轻的毕业生与2010年时一样，同样在就业不足中感到不满。突尼斯的情况也同样糟糕，正如它引发“阿拉伯之春”时那样。

以色列在加沙的战争让阿拉伯各国政府显得无能或共谋。随着加沙地带被摧毁，穆斯林兄弟会的创始主张——即阿拉伯世界的屈辱在物质层面之前首先是精神层面的——对该地区许多心怀愤懑的人来说依然有意义。兄弟会通过社会福利计划和对阿拉伯尊严的强烈呼吁扎根，而这两点在整个中东的领导层中都严重缺失。当该组织在2028年3月迎来成立100周年时，无论其领导层如何分裂，预计它都将依然充满活力。■

经济学人 企业

没有两家企业是完全相同的。为什么它们的 AI 应该是？

img-73.jpeg

扫描以了解更多：

AI 如何改变工作——以及人们所需的技能。

人工智能正在改变人们的工作方式。它使常规任务自动化，从而让人们能够专注于需要创造力和判断力的活动。但它也面临着重新定义传统角色或完全消除某些岗位的风险。组织应该如何重新设计雇佣关系和工作流程，以从这项技术中获益？

Tech Frontiers 是 Economist Enterprise 推出的一项计划，它将原创研究与活动相结合，汇聚领导者共同重新思考智能机器时代的工作方式。

Tech Frontiers 得到了包括以下组织在内的支持：

Infosys pwc rubrik

Economist Enterprise 是《经济学人》集团的 B2B 部门。其独立于《经济学人》运行。

49

亚洲

img-74.jpeg

印度

一法统领所有

德拉敦

执政党表面上的自由主义论调，旨在让所有印度人在结婚、离婚和继承方面都像印度教徒一样

在隔壁清真寺结束日落祷告回来后，库尔希德·艾哈迈德（Khursheed Ahmed）挥手示意他那全男性的随行人员离开，以便与一名女记者交谈。这位 71 岁的社区领袖面色阴沉。一项他花费数月时间游说反对但未能成功的法律让他陷入了困境。他纳闷，一个人怎么能既是一个敬畏上帝的穆斯林，又是一个遵守法律的印度人？“如果你不遵循沙里亚法，你就不是穆斯林，”他说。但自 2025 年 1 月起，在艾哈迈德先生所在的北阿坎德邦，穆斯林遵守其许多习惯性家庭法已成为非法行为。

这就是印度大部分地区即将面临的局面。位于喜马拉雅山脉的北阿坎德邦是独立后的印度第一个实施统一民法典（UCC）的邦，该法典旨在适用于几乎所有公民，无论其信仰如何。该法典旨在用一套统一的结婚、离婚、继承和收养规则，取代基于宗教的个人法。今年以来，阿萨姆邦、古吉拉特邦和中央邦的立法者已经通过了本质上相同的法典，尽管尚未生效；另有五个邦计划效仿。如果西孟加拉邦如预期在本月通过自己的法律，将有近 30m 更多穆斯林面临艾哈迈德先生的困境。

所有通过统一民法典的邦都由印度人民党（BJP）执政，这是一个领导该国及其许多邦的印度教民族主义组织。在 4 月的邦选举后，该党接管了西孟加拉邦。印度人民党将新法典呈现为普世人权，特别是女性权利的问题。但仔细观察就会发现，实际上这是一个将印度教徒已经遵循的法律和习俗强加给宗教少数群体的过程。

基本原则看起来公平且简单：每个印度人都应遵循相同的法律。他们之所以没有这样做，可以追溯到分治的创伤。在 1947, 离去的英国人将印度分裂为穆斯林占多数的巴基斯坦和印度教徒占多数的印度之后，印度的印度教徒希望缓解新国家少数群体的焦虑。他们制定了一部宪法，允许包括穆斯林在内的宗教团体管理自己的民事事务。

现在不再如此。统一法典赋予穆斯林女儿与印度教女儿在 2005. 赢得的相同的平等继承权。它们将穆斯林男性的多妻制定为犯罪。与北阿坎德邦的穆斯林女性交谈，许多人很高兴看到这些修正。这使得人们很容易将批评者斥为保守的怪人。“极端的伊斯兰主义者认为你不能篡改上帝的意愿，”沙特鲁格纳·辛格（Shatrughna Singh）说道，他是一名印度教徒，曾任北阿坎德邦起草委员会成员，目前负责该法在该邦的推行。

→ 本节其他内容

50 罗兴亚人的残酷流亡

51 东南亚的烟雾

51 日本整顿其情报机构

52 阿育王：威尼斯 v 大阪

50 亚洲

但现实是，这些法典并非女性解放的工具，甚至不是任何形式的自由主义。例如，北阿坎德邦法典的一项规定要求所有同居伴侣必须在 30 天内向政府登记同居关系，否则将面临监禁风险。政府和党派官员坚称，其目的是通过将非正式关系公开化，保护女性免受剥削男性的侵害。但许多情侣正是为了保护自己免受窥视而避免正式登记——尤其是那些处于非传统关系中的人们，例如跨种姓或跨信仰的关系。该法典有可能使这种关系变成所有人的关注点。在某些版本的法典中，宗教领袖、父母甚至普通公众都可以提出异议，并阻止伴侣同居。

新法典也没有从印度各种传统中挑选出最有利于女性的部分。以穆斯林个人法为例，根据其规定，女性通常比印度教妻子能更快地摆脱有毒的婚姻。此外，她们还受到“聘金”（mehr）的保护，即准丈夫必须在结婚时支付的一笔款项，以确保妻子的经济独立。然而，印度金德尔全球大学（Jindal Global University）的法学学者索姆亚·萨克塞纳（Saumya Saxena）表示，北阿坎德邦这个全由印度教徒组成的统一民法典（UCC）起草委员会“基本上是复制粘贴”了之前的印度教个人法，并将其强加给宗教少数群体。

统一民法典并未纠正印度教法律中的不公正之处，这些法律至今仍经常将寡妇、妻子和母亲排除在继承祖产之外。它也没有从印度的部落社区中汲取灵感，而这些社区通常对女性最为优待；批评者指出，这些部落社区（通常投票给印度人民党 BJP）被排除在法典之外。

当北阿坎德邦的官员面对外国观众时，他们确保将该法律称为“进步的”和“世俗的”。但当他们解释为什么该法典首先在北阿坎德邦试行时，宗教很快就侵入了他们的逻辑——在北阿坎德邦，印度人民党在过去25年历史的大部分时间里一直执政。他们说，这个在每年此时被朝圣者淹没的邦，对印度教徒来说就像耶路撒冷之于犹太人一样神圣。他们声称穆斯林人口正在爆炸式增长，并低声议论一种“扩张心态”，认为这种心态驱动穆斯林男性娶多个妻子，据称是为了在生育数量上胜过印度教徒。

从表面上看，北阿坎德邦的实验在很大程度上具有象征意义。该新法下的首起刑事案件直到今年4月才出现，当时一名女性反对其丈夫试图利用“哈拉拉”（halala，一种古老的穆斯林离婚习俗）。截至7月初，在人口1200万的该邦，正式承认同居关系的夫妇不足100对。但随着时间的推移，

法律可能会将穆斯林进一步推离主流。艾哈迈德先生建议穆斯林同胞避开法庭，在社区内部悄悄解决争议。这最终可能会增加分歧，而非消除分歧。

北阿坎德邦仅仅是印度人民党实现将印度变为印度教国家的梦想的一次演习。在这个保守的印度教邦，对新法的抵制较为微弱，推行过程也平淡无奇。现在，北阿坎德邦的辛格先生有了新工作，进入了西孟加拉邦的起草委员会。西孟加拉邦的穆斯林人口接近30%，大约是全国平均水平的两倍，并以其始终充满活力且经常暴力的政治而闻名。直到5月，它还是少数几个从未由印度人民党执政的邦之一。当该邦议会开始讨论其自己的新民法典时，一些观察人士担心会出现动荡。■

罗兴亚人

在避难所中寻求避难

吉隆坡

来自缅甸的难民在马来西亚生活在恐惧之中

“我不想再出门了。我大部分时间都待在家里，我非常渴望离开马来西亚。”努尔·萨德克（Nur Sadek）这样说道，他是一名罗兴亚难民兼社区组织者，近五年前从缅甸来到这个国家。萨德克分享了一些陌生人发来的信息，对方威胁要对他实施暴力，有些信息甚至指出了他可能出现的地方。一名陌生人还给他发了一段步枪开火的视频。

对于罗兴亚人来说，在马来西亚的生活从未好过——他们是缅甸境内遭受残酷迫害的穆斯林少数群体，长期以来一直寻求在东南亚其他地方避难，通常乘坐破旧的小船抵达。联合国官方统计在该国的人数超过 100,000 人，但实际人数无疑更高。他们并不住在难民营里，但也没有享有多少权利。他们不被允许寻求正式就业，他们的孩子也不能在马来西亚的学校就读。

最近，一场在马来西亚社交媒体上愈演愈烈的仇恨运动使情况大大恶化。5 月，一些疯传的帖子指责难民在穆斯林宰牲节（Eid al-Adha）期间未妥善处理宰杀动物的残骸。6 月，一篇帖子虚假地声称，有超过 200 万名婴儿是由罗兴亚人与马来人组成的夫妇所生（这利用了当地人担心外国人抢夺当地女性并生下成为公民的孩子的旧有忧虑）。另一篇帖子配了一张虚构的（AI 生成的）“马来西亚罗兴亚总统”照片，据称该总统要求划出一个完整的城镇专门给罗兴亚人居住。分享该帖子的马来西亚人中包括副总理的女儿。

十年前，马来西亚人更为热情。2017 年，当大量罗兴亚人开始逃离罗兴格州（Rakhine state）的军事清剿（联合国将其描述为“种族清洗的教科书式案例”）时，许多马来西亚人愿意支持他们。而如今，马来西亚人正感受到生活成本上升和经济管理不善带来的压力。难民成了方便的替罪羊。

网络上的恶毒言论产生了现实世界的影响。6 月和 7 月，马来西亚至少有九所教授罗兴亚儿童的非正式学校被关闭，要么是被当局关闭（因无执照），要么是被担心安全的员工关闭；一名教师说，他告诉孩子们不要 ►

Better than the alternative

亚洲 51

► 成群结队地行走。马来西亚政府现在经常遣返或扣押罗兴亚人的船只。最近，在报道称发生驱逐事件后，警方拘留了 100 多名前往马来西亚首都吉隆坡联合国办事处的罗兴亚难民。7 月 29 日，马来西亚宣布计划将约 5,000 名罗兴亚难民遣返回缅甸，而他们在那里可能面临生命危险。马来西亚律师协会主席阿南德·拉杰（Anand Raj）警告说，此类遣返“既不人道，也不是一个可行的方案”。

无论在马来西亚的情况变得多么糟糕，罗兴亚人无疑会继续尝试抵达那里。据已知情况，去年约有 6,500 名罗兴亚人尝试乘船航行，高于 2023 年的 4,300 人和 2020 年的 2,400 人。一名在马来西亚的难民说：“如果我们不逃离，我们早就被杀死了。” ■

东南亚

阴云笼罩

新加坡

随着该地区准备迎接更多的烟雾，它是否从过去的危机中吸取了教训？

2015年，当东南亚被印度尼西亚火灾引发的有毒烟雾笼罩时，时任印尼副总统的朱苏夫·卡拉（Jusuf Kalla）暗示，他的邻国需要改变看法。他说：“11个月里，他们享受着来自印尼的清新空气，却从未感谢过我们。”东南亚民众纷纷涌向一个旨在向印尼表达感激的讽刺网站。该网站已记录了超过3400万次讽刺性的感谢投票。

这个数字可能很快会增加。随着印尼境内火势肆虐，人们对再次出现严重霾害的担忧正在上升。气象观察员估计，仅在8月的前12天里，在婆罗洲岛上检测到的火灾数量就超过了过去七年中每年的全月记录（见图表）。烟雾已经迫使官员采取行动。在印尼西加里曼丹省的首府坤甸，学校已经关闭。在邻国马来西亚的砂拉越，官员敦促民众留在室内。新加坡已将其应急响应人员置于待命状态。

气象学家担心情况会变得更糟。厄尔尼诺（El Niño）是一种与太平洋异常温暖水域相关的天气模式，往往会导致该地区气候更加干燥。这增加了火灾的可能性，尤其是在印尼的泥炭地，那里富含碳的土壤更易燃，且地下阴燃的火灾难以扑灭。许多气候学家认为，今年的厄尔尼诺将成为迄今为止最强的一次，从而引发了人们对一次与2015年相当的霾害事件的担忧。

那将是一场灾难。一项研究显示，2015年的烟雾导致印尼、马来西亚和新加坡约有100,000人超额死亡。但经济损失同样沉重：世界银行估计印尼的损失为161亿美元，几乎占GDP.的2%。该地区的经济已经十分脆弱，且在不同程度上受到了伊朗战争的影响。

那场战争也可能加剧霾害。对霍尔木兹海峡的封锁推高了燃料和化肥成本，促使印尼政府强制要求增加生物燃料的使用。这反过来又推高了对棕榈油的需求，给农民和种植园公司带来了压力，迫使他们用火开垦更多土地。

该地区的准备情况可能比十年前更好。更好的卫星监测改善了预测。新加坡的一个中心追踪整个地区的火灾和烟雾并提供预警，使各国政府能够实施公共卫生措施。今年4月，区域组织东盟（ASEAN）在印尼首都雅加达成立了一个新霾害控制中心的秘书处，旨在加强各国政府之间的协调。

但尽管有这些区域合作机制，它仍然缺乏足够的约束力。东盟自2002年起就签署了关于跨境霾害的协议，但执行和强制力仍取决于各国政府。其用于支付抗霾资源（如水投飞机和其他消防设备）的基金依赖于自愿捐款，规模依然较小。

最终，今年霾害问题的严重程度将取决于印尼的情况。在2015年的灾难之后，时任总统佐科·维多多（Joko Widodo）将预防工作列为优先事项。他的继任者普拉博沃·苏比安托（Prabowo Subianto）延续了大部分这一重点。去年，他成立了一个新部门来应对火灾，并加强了巡逻、空中监视和应急团队。在接下来的几周里，他们将面临一场严峻的考验。■

令人担忧的迹象

东南亚*，8月检测到的火灾†，'000

img-76.jpeg

*马来西亚、印度尼西亚、新加坡和文莱 †使用卫星图像计算的代理指标 ‡截至8月12日 来源：东盟专门气象中心

日本

间谍时代

东京

日本迟到已久的情报服务机构改革

一张写有手写字符的木牌照片标志着日本新成立的“国家情报局”（NIB）于7月31日正式启动。对于日本情报体系的一次重大大修来说，这种低调的揭晓方式十分恰当。

日本的情报机构长期以来一直处于碎片化且羸弱的状态。自第二次世界大战战败以来，法律和政治上的限制使其难以应对在内部潜伏的对手，也难以在海外开展人力情报（HUMINT）行动。日本首相高市早苗（Takaichi Sanae）表示，成立国家情报局以及设立新的国家情报委员会，是在日益危险的世界中航行所必需的更广泛改革的第一步。

日本曾是一个强大的情报参与者。在20世纪初的日俄战争期间，日军破解密码，在远东派遣特工，并资助欧洲的反沙皇煽动者；在第二次世界大战期间，“特别勤务单位”在亚洲各地开展秘密行动。

但在日本战败后，帝国时期的架构在很大程度上被拆除。建立一个新的集中情报服务的尝试遭到了公众的强烈抵制，因为人们对帝国时代的秘密警察记忆犹新；许多日本领导人乐于在情报方面依赖美国，就像他们在整体安全方面所做的那样。日本自己的情报活动分散在外交部、国防部、司法部以及警察厅的各个独立部门中。内阁情报调查室（CIRO）名义上是该国最高的情报机构，但缺乏管理这些碎片化机构的权力。正如一名日本官员在21世纪初抱怨的那样，与美国的中央情报局（CIA）相比，日本的内阁情报调查室“大约相当于一所幼儿园”。

最新的改革旨在帮助日本的情报界快速成长。日本情报史《特别勤务》（Special Duty）的作者理查德·塞缪尔斯（Richard Samuels）表示，第一阶段涉及“理顺结构”。新局是内阁情报调查室的升级版，将有权整合来自各不同部门的信息并生成综合分析。与此同时，由首相亲自领导的情报委员会，使政治领导人能够制定情报战略并将调查结果整合到政策制定中。接下来的计划步骤包括通过一项反间谍法以加强反情报工作，以及创建一个新的对外情报机构以在海外开展行动。

52 亚洲

尽管此类改革已被讨论了数十年，但进程在近年来有所加速。来自中国、俄罗斯和朝鲜日益增长的威胁使人们警觉，而对美国可靠性日益增加的焦虑则提高了开发本土能力的紧迫性。高市女士将情报改革作为其政治纲领的支柱。随着战争时代的记忆淡去，公众对新安全机构的反对情绪也随之减弱。

为了使改革取得成功，日本需要克服几个长期存在的问题。东京日本大学的小谷健（Kotani Ken）表示，首先是情报生产者之间的官僚“地盘之争”。第二个问题是日本情报消费者的专业程度相对不足。小谷先生指出，该国的政治家“不习惯在政策制定中利用情报”。

在执政的自由民主党自己的建议中，该党呼吁国会议员更加积极主动，而不是像顾客那样“在寿司店被动地订购‘Omakase’（由厨师决定）”。■

阿育王：国家之艺

为何印度在威尼斯大获成功，却在大阪惨遭失败

关于去年大阪世界博览会印度馆，能说的最客气的话就是它很“地道”。它开馆时间延迟了两周多。现场一片混乱。其展出的古代寺庙和古画看起来像是某种古老的旅游推广广告。而且，理所当然地，其中还包含了纳伦德拉·莫迪的“鼓舞人心的谈话和演讲”。正如一位居住在印度的日本游客所言：“那些混乱的部分……非常有印度特色，所以如果你想感受印度的氛围，我绝对推荐你去看看。”

因此，当本专栏作家站在今年威尼斯双年展（展期至11月）印度馆的门槛前时，心中不免有些忐忑。这是印度自2019年以来首次参加这一全球顶尖的当代艺术展。在那次展览中，政府指示策展人从甘地诞辰150周年中汲取灵感。这是一个只有官僚才能想出来的题目：缺乏创意，缺乏想象力，而且最重要的是，不太可能让任何人陷入麻烦（不过艺术作品本身受到了赞赏）。而今年的展览则由同一个部门——文化部——负责监督，而该部门正是大阪那场灾难的操盘手。

但阿育王（Ashoka）无需担心。这个展馆取得了巨大的成功。由巴黎阿尔·萨尼收藏馆（Al Thani Collection）馆长阿明·贾法尔（Amin Jaffer）策展，它汇集了五位艺术家，在印度经历剧烈的物理转型之际，共同探讨“家”的含义。其中两件作品抢尽风头。苏马克希·辛格（Sumakshi Singh）的《永久地址》（Permanent Address）用精致的丝绸、棉花和尼龙重建了她祖父母在德里的家，而那座房子早已被拆除以给新建筑让路——这是每个印度城市都熟悉的故事。而阿西姆·瓦基夫（Asim Waqif）宏伟的《查尔》（Chaal）则是由数百根巨大的竹竿交织而成，致敬了这个永远处于建设状态的国家中无处不在的脚手架材料。

结果是，这次展览专业地完成了大阪展馆笨拙地尝试的事情。它借鉴了印度的传统（在这种情况下是工艺和当地材料），并将它们与该国的现代状况联系起来。它的成就在于以一种让人感到真实的方式代表了印度——而这一次，这种真实是出于正确的原因。评论赞誉有加。印度馆出现在了多个“不容错过”的展馆名单中。

同一个部门，在同一个政治领导层下，如何在短短一年之间产生如此截然不同的结果？简单的答案是，期间负责的官员更换了。印度政府产生的结果往往参差不齐，因为其中很大程度上取决于个人能力而非制度流程。但一个更实质性的答案在于新任文化部秘书维韦克·阿加瓦尔（Vivek Aggarwal）实际做了什么。也就是说，他做得更少。

大阪项目是自上而下的。它被授予一家私营公司，随后在没有公开解释的情况下被取消，最后由文化部下属的艺术机构执行。而威尼斯展馆则是政府与印度两家领先艺术机构的合作。位于孟买的尼塔·穆凯什·安巴尼文化中心（Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre）是一家资金雄厚且关系极佳的组织，它带来了影响力与专业知识。以在果阿举办年度艺术节而闻名的非营利组织 Serendipity Arts 则负责策划方案。政府负责处理文书工作、物流以及不可避免的额外费用。在伊朗战争干扰航运后，瓦基夫先生作品所需的约12吨竹子不得不通过空运运往威尼斯。

阿加瓦尔先生的背景是金融和基础设施，这可能有所帮助。他知道自己不知道什么。政府信任其合作伙伴，将关于艺术的决定交给艺术专业人士。政府唯一真实的要求是展览要代表多元的声音。虽然单一艺术家的展馆往往更具连贯性，但政府希望邀请来自不同地区、使用不同本土媒介的艺术家。除此之外，它赋予了贾法尔先生完全的艺术自由。

在威尼斯取得的成功，鼓励了文化部重申其对公私合作伙伴关系的承诺。阿加瓦尔先生表示，他已经致信威尼斯，希望为 2028 年的下一届艺术双年展预留空间。他计划在今年晚些时候于德里举办一场大型艺术活动，并邀请画廊和基金会参与，同时还将对印度数百处历史古迹的管理方式进行改革。其核心理念是让文化遗产和艺术成为经济增长更重要的贡献者。印度政府往往试图以过少的资源做过多的事情。而在极少数它信任印度人发挥其充沛才干的场合，其结果往往令人惊叹。■

53

中国

心理健康与治疗

寻求帮助

北京

护理服务碎片化且不均衡，但政府希望做出改变

在肖遥（Xiao Yao）的客户中，大部分是 20 到 40 岁之间的女性，其中有一半的人没有告诉父母他们支付 500 元（$75）进行心理咨询。这位 33 岁的心理咨询师表示，年长一代往往不太重视心理健康，他们会问：“这不就是不开心吗？你是不是想太多了？”

在一个经历了深刻经济和社会变革且竞争极其激烈的社会中，许多中国人正与心理健康问题作斗争。一项新研究显示，在过去的三十年里，精神疾病的发病率大幅上升。尽管现在有更多患者寻求帮助，但精神科服务仍然有限。与此同时，一个新兴的治疗行业在很大程度上缺乏监管，且往往难以负担。

这项发表在英国医学期刊《柳叶刀》（Lancet）上的研究，提供了迄今为止关于中国精神障碍患病率最全面的估算，2023 年有 1910 例（相当于大约每七个中国人中就有一人）。这比 1990 年增加了 46%，但在考虑到人口老龄化和人口增加后，估算的患病率高出 14.6%。由于这些是基于有时较为稀疏的数据和诊断得出的模型估算值，这些数字很可能是对真实情况的低估。焦虑和抑郁是最常见的疾病，而进食障碍的增长速度最快（见下一页图表）。

尽管社会污名化和不愿承认精神疾病的情况长期存在，但寻求帮助的呼声正在增加。加州大学戴维斯分校的李张（Li Zhang）——一位撰写关于中国焦虑与心理治疗书籍的作者——表示，疫情标志着一个转折点。张女士说，封锁导致抑郁和焦虑激增；人们对其他精神疾病患者变得更加同情，也更能接受自己的问题。

在疫情期间，许多中国人首次寻求心理咨询。由于无法离开家，无法接触到治疗师的沙发，他们直接转向了屏幕。自助服务和心理服务在网上蓬勃发展。数千万人在销售咨询课程和其他课程的应用程序上消费。许多人还利用免费资源：新的政府心理支持热线在 2025 年接到了 700,000 多个电话，今年上半年接到了 900,000 个。

2021 年发表在《柳叶刀》上的另一篇论文发现，在 1,007 名患有抑郁障碍的受访中国人中，仅 9.5% 接受了治疗，而仅有 0.5% 得到了充分的治疗。政府目前的目标是在 2030 年之前建立一个全国性的心理支持和危机干预体系，让更多人能够获得药物治疗和心理治疗。计划包括在每所学校设立咨询室，在每个县的至少一家医院提供精神科服务，并增加心理健康专业人员。

对社会不稳定的担忧促使官方采取紧急行动。今年 6 月，一名私人飞行员撞向北京最高的塔楼，▶

→ 本节其他内容

54 朱镕基逝世，享年 97 岁

55 查瓜专栏：安全剧场

54 中国

► 导致其身亡，这是首都一次罕见的安保漏洞。调查人员称该男子患有焦虑症和自杀倾向。2024 年，发生的一系列针对公众的暴力袭击（包括车辆冲撞和持刀袭击）引起了官方对心理健康的关注。专家将这些袭击描述为对社会的报复，由那些对自身财务状况或感知到的不公正感到愤怒的男性所实施。共产党凭借其对清单和口号的痴迷，加强了对“四无五失”人员的监控，即没有配偶、孩子、工作或资产的人；或者遭受投资失败、生活挫折、关系冲突、情绪失衡或精神障碍的人。

中国在精神疾病识别和治疗方面的极低率或许终于有所改善。顶尖精神卫生医院——上海市精神卫生中心（SMHC）的袁程梅指出，公众意识的增强以及对轻度心理困扰病例的识别能力提升起到了作用。然而，接诊能力、可负担性和健全监管的问题依然存在。中国的人均心理治疗师数量远低于西方。袁医生表示，即使是比中国其他地区拥有更高比例合格员工的上海市精神卫生中心，也难以跟上日益增长的需求。该中心采取的一种应对措施是增加团体咨询。

但在其他地方，心理咨询处于一种缺乏标准执业许可要求的混乱状态。关于欺诈和违规执业的报道屡见不鲜。在线平台正在提高对受训且经验丰富的咨询师的要求，专业协会也在推广其伦理准则。但政府在监管现实生活中的治疗师方面投入的精力，还不如在搜捕那些导致情感依赖的AI聊天机器人上多。

可负担性仍然是一个大问题。

许多最需要护理的人最没有能力支付费用。在房地产危机进入第五年之际，地方政府用于精神卫生投资的资金减少了。

与此同时，在提高意识和接纳度方面还需要做更多工作。在中国，“精神病”仍然是一个常见的侮辱词。年轻人正在逐步消除围绕精神健康的顽固污名。肖女士表示，对许多年轻人来说，心理咨询就像是“补课”，就像学生在面对困难科目时参加的另一种补习班。即便如此，随着越来越多的人对咨询持开放态度，他们并非都理解咨询意味着什么。袁医生说，心理咨询是一个缓慢的过程，但许多来访者认为在进行一两次咨询后就能好转。此外，肖女士还指出，即使是那些理解这一点的人，在被解雇或减薪后，也经常会减少或放弃就诊。目前，精神疾病的治疗仍然是一项主要由富裕阶层才能负担得起的奢侈品。■

朱镕基逝世，享年97岁

最后一位改革派

这位务实的前总理在如今习近平的权力格局中将没有立足之地

朱镕基在1998年至2003年期间担任中国总理，是市场开放改革的先驱。他为人务实，说话直率，且具有强烈的好奇心。在许多方面，他与当今中国的领导层截然相反，在寻求将中国融入世界经济的过程中，他避开了意识形态。此外，他在一个集体领导体制中拥有巨大的权力，而这一体制随后被国家主席习近平拆除。

“朱老板”在2001年带领中国加入世界贸易组织，并助力开启了一段前所未有的增长期。但他的努力也导致数千万国企员工失业，并为中国目前与美国之间的一些紧张关系埋下了伏笔。

他几乎是出生于20世纪20年代和30年代的中国“第三代”领导人中最后的幸存者。在清华大学学习电气工程后，他加入了国家计委。他的官方讣告将其描述为“卓越的无产阶级革命家、政治家、领导者”。但由于领导人的逝世在过去曾引发动荡，讣告省略了朱先生职业生涯中更具争议的细节，包括他在20世纪50年代后期被谴责为“右派”，以及随后在近乎被遗忘的状态中度过的二十年，期间曾担任过农场劳工。

在1976年毛泽东逝世后，他得到了平反，政治生涯随即起飞，12年后他成为了上海市市长。在那里，他与当时的上海市委书记江泽民共事，后者在1989年天安门广场周围的亲民主抗议活动遭到镇压后，被提升至中国最高领导岗位。两年后，朱先生也被召集至北京，负责经济管理，先任副总理，后任总理。他振兴了陷入低谷的市场改革，抑制了通货膨胀，并改革了中央税制，从而增加了财政收入并加强了对地方的控制。他将国有企业私有化，清除腐败或无能的官僚，并吸引外国投资者。他还培养了一批经济和金融专家，这些人在他退休后很长一段时间内仍担任高级职务。

此后，习近平边缘化了朱先生的许多门生，并撤销了他的一些措施，加强了对私营企业的管控。习近平不再可能任命一位像朱先生那样具有影响力且个性鲜明的总理。在今天的中国，只能有一个老板。

img-79.jpeg

他让经济之花绽放

压力剧增

中国，精神障碍率*，1990-2023年增长百分比

img-80.jpeg

*年龄标准化患病率

†特发性发育性智力障碍

来源：“National and subnational burden of mental disorders in China, 1990-2023”，Y. Li 等著，《柳叶刀-区域健康》（The Lancet Regional Health），2026年

中国 55

中国官员痴迷于“安全表演”

公众喜欢所有的管控——直到这些管控妨碍了他们

在位于中国东部城市济南的一座新地铁站里，乘坐自动扶梯充满了危险。至少警告标志是这么暗示的。该标志共禁止 14 项行为，每项都配有红线划掉的插图：禁止在扶梯上行走，禁止面向错误方向，当然也禁止嬉戏。此外还有七项指令，包括使用扶手、紧握幼儿以及穿着软底鞋时要小心。

查官（Chaguan）忐忑地踏上去——并毫发无伤地到达底部；这座扶梯确实和任何其他扶梯一样。大多数乘客几乎没有注意到这个标志。他们对待地铁入口的安全检查也同样习以为常。检查站看起来像机场一样，设有金属探测门、行李 X 光机和挥舞扫描仪的安保人员。还有一个用于放置可疑物品的巨大防爆桶。但安保人员很放松。其中一人快活地说，那个桶从未被使用过。通过检查轻而易举，就像在中国各地的车站一样。

直到偶尔出现例外。7 月下旬，南部大都市深圳的交通部门突然加强了地铁安检。安保人员不再漫不经心地向乘客挥动扫描仪，而是仔细扫描每一个人。当行李 X 光检查发现打火机或香水瓶超过允许限制时，这些物品会被没收。安检队伍越排越长，有些旅客等待了半小时。显而易见的理由是深圳将在今年晚些时候举办 APEC 峰会。习近平主席将出席，绝不能出任何差错。

值得肯定的是，深圳在居民抱怨后迅速做出了调整。“比起恐怖主义，我更担心在人群中被挤扁，”这是网上一个典型的评论。几天之内，深圳简化了检查流程并安装了额外的金属探测器，让乘客能够恢复几乎无碍的通勤。

即便如此，这一事件揭示了中国在安全与自由之间每日进行的平衡行为。中国以外的评论员经常关注其中的反乌托邦元素。监控摄像头无处不在，社交媒体帖子受到严密监控，敏感区域设有检查站。然而在中国内部，很少有人因为这些措施而陷入困境，且公众对这些措施的认可度似乎很高。研究人员一致发现，许多中国公民认为安全应高于隐私。在济南，老年人的赞美最为热烈。“人这么多，安检是必要的。这让我们安心，”一位正前往地铁站的白发女性任女士说道。

看待中国的一种方式是将其视为一个安全国家（security state），其在国内警务和“维稳”上的支出大致与军费预算相当。其中很大一部分旨在应对政治威胁，反映了共产党对其国民的恐惧。但交通管控指向了不同的方向：中国是一个安全国家（safety state），党将预防事故和日常暴力放在极高优先级。这种冲动值得称赞，但在实践中可能会令人窒息。

深圳的经历说明了有时会浮现的紧张关系——这种紧张不在于安全与个人自由的对立，而在于便利性。当安检几乎没有摩擦时，人们支持它；当摩擦增加时，态度随之改变。直白地说，人们喜欢这个安全国家，直到它妨碍了他们，尤其是当管控措施与实际威胁不成比例时。一个巨大的例子就是动态清零政策。公众最初支持政府的限制，接受武汉的封城以及随后对特定人员和区域的隔离，将其视为少数人付出的代价。但到 2022 年底，人们感到精疲力竭，罕见的抗议活动爆发了。在北京，这被视为一个教训，即官员必须在要求放宽管控的呼声变得更具政治色彩之前，警觉地察觉到舆论的转变。

这些转向并非轻易发生。问题不在于官员天生痴迷于安全，而在于安全是其职业生涯的核心。在所谓的“一票否决”制度下，一次安全漏洞或严重事故就可能让他们失去晋升机会。在习近平领导下，这种否决权得到了加强：官员不仅在发生坏事时受到惩罚，在未能执行安全协议时也会受罚。检查组会突然出现在地铁站检查X光机，或出现在街头确保巡逻到位。可见的管控手段激增：托儿所门前的头盔守卫，流行音乐会和足球赛场上成排的警察（远超监督和平人群所需的数量），以及银行和购物中心里准备就绪的防暴盾牌。济南地铁上的自动扶梯警告则是所有这些表演中最具喜剧色彩的部分，是一种典型的“免责式”家长作风。

但代价是什么？

对于官员们来说，还存在另一种权衡，而且随着时间的推移，这种权衡将产生更深的影响。所有的安全措施都需要资金。仅安保人员的费用就约占地铁运营预算的十分之一。他们的薪水并不高，但劳动力池的萎缩必然会随着时间推移推高工资，对于负债累累的地方政府来说，这是一个令人不安的前景。客观而言，层层叠加的安全措施有些过头了。毫无疑问，中国是一个非常安全的国家。中国地铁系统每天平均客流量近 1 亿人次，约占全球总数的一半。在地铁上，无论大宗还是小宗犯罪都极其罕见。

但这难道要归功于所有的检查站吗？普通的中国公民因其文明有序的行为理应获得赞赏。而且，就安全措施预防犯罪而言，在街道、车站和列车上监视的摄像头比安保人员和 X 光机更有用，且成本更低。然而，这并非官员们的考量，因为对他们来说，安全与其说是为了效率，不如说是为了证明他们没有将任何事情交给运气。另外请记住：电梯上禁止行走。■

56

国际

img-82.jpeg

美国慈善事业

薪火相传

旧金山

AI 创始人承诺捐出数千亿美元。这些资金将如何使用？

捐给慈善机构的每一美元所能产生的正面影响可能很快会降低。在未来几年，将一名儿童从疾病或饥饿中拯救出来的边际成本可能会从约 $5,000 跃升至 $15,000 甚至更高。这听起来令人担忧。但硅谷最具影响力的资助机构之一 Coefficient Giving 的亚历山大·伯格（Alexander Berger）认为，这实际上是个好消息。像他这样的非营利组织会优先投入在廉价且可规模化的干预措施上——例如，在购买疟疾疫苗之前先购买疟疾防护网。如果大量捐款覆盖了所有低成本的行善方式，那么剩余资金将流向成本更高但能拯救更多生命的利他行为。

这样一场资金洪流可能即将到来。非营利组织正准备迎接历史上最大规模的一次性慈善捐赠激增。AI 的繁荣让硅谷的许多技术人员变得极其富有。Anthropic 和 OpenAI 的股票首次公开募股（IPO）最早可能在今年发生，这可能会使这些 AI 实验室的估值分别超过 10 亿美元——从而让其创始人、员工和投资者富可敌国。许多人正在思考如何捐出他们的资金；累计来看，他们已经承诺捐赠估计 4300亿美元，相当于如今货币价值的两个“马歇尔计划”。

工业时代产生了卡内基、洛克菲勒和福特，他们的财富资助了大学并建造了音乐厅。互联网时代创造了“捐赠誓言”（Giving Pledge）：比尔·盖茨、梅琳达·盖茨、马克·扎克伯格及其同类人士支持全球最贫困人口的农业、教育和医疗保健。支付公司 Stripe 负责公共产品的南·兰索霍夫（Nan Ransohoff）预测，AI 现在可能会创造第三次且规模大得多的捐赠浪潮。

→ 本节其他内容

58 电报：台湾的民主

引导当今许多新富阶层建立改变世界的企业的雄心，现在正像他们的前辈一样，引导他们想要治愈世界的疾苦。

然而，AI 慈善家将在重要方面有所不同。他们将惊人的财富与不同寻常的紧迫感相结合，在某些情况下，还持有异于常人的道德观。向全球最贫困人口提供现金的慈善机构 GiveDirectly 的尼克·阿拉迪斯（Nick Allardice）表示，该机构正准备接收数千万美元的新资金。“这可能是一个可以让数亿人的生活得到改善的时刻，历史上这样的时刻可能并不多。”

事实上，承诺的 AI 捐赠规模远超之前的慈善浪潮。今年 1 月，包括公司负责人达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）在内的 Anthropic 所有七位联合创始人承诺捐出其 80% 的财富。《福布斯》的估计表明，他们的合计捐赠额可能达到 1100亿美元。兰索霍夫女士表示，Anthropic 的员工可能很快会有约 600亿美元 投入到“捐赠者建议基金”（DAFs）中。Anthropic 会匹配员工向这些基金提供的慈善捐款。持有同名公司 26% 股份的 OpenAI 基金会可能有约 2600亿美元 可供捐赠。OpenAI 的员工大概率也将成为捐赠者。

总计，Anthropic 和 OpenAI 的 IPO 可能会为慈善事业释放约 4300亿美元 的资金。 ▶

国际 57

这相当于约 25 个福特基金会的捐赠规模。此外还有规模较小的 AI 初创公司，其创始人承诺捐出其工作所得。保守估计，每年可能有约 205亿美元 被拨出。相比之下，美国个人在 2025. 捐赠了 390亿美元。除了一个方面外，这一浪潮的价值在所有方面都令之前的浪潮相形见绌。由于现在的美国富有得多，这一浪潮占 GDP 的份额约为 1.3%，低于工业时代的企业家，后者当时的捐赠额按今日货币计算约为 350亿美元，即当时 GDP 的 1.9%。但它将远超互联网浪潮，后者在 1990 到 2018 期间共拨出 2300亿美元，占 GDP 的 0.8%（见图表）。与此同时，官方援助预算正在下降。

给我一个理由

我们是否应该期待出现一座“阿莫代大厅”或“萨姆·奥特曼博物馆”？如今这些潜在的 AI 慈善家比他们的前辈要古怪得多。虽然并非全部，但其中许多人信奉“有效利他主义”（Effective Altruism，简称 EA）的世界观。这是一个由超理性主义者组成的运动，他们声称通过确定回报最高且基于证据的捐款用途来行善。因欺诈其对冲基金客户而入狱的萨姆·班克曼-弗里德（Sam Bankman-Fried）就曾拥护 EA 中一个流行的信念——“为了捐赠而赚钱”（earning-to-give），即信奉者通过赚取大量财富，然后将其收入的一部分作为什一税捐出。

科学研究和全球公共卫生有望获得更多资金。今年 6 月，Anthropic、OpenAI 基金会和 Stripe 领头捐赠了 5亿美元，用于研发感冒和流感病毒的疫苗。牛津大学智库有效利他主义中心（Centre for Effective Altruism）的扎卡里·罗宾逊（Zachary Robinson）表示，项目可能会变得更具雄心。例如，EA 的资助金用于资助基因改造蚊子的研究，旨在要么摧毁这些昆虫的种群，要么使它们对疟原虫产生抗药性。每年约有 600,000 人死于疟疾，因此此类捐赠确实可能具有成本效益。

EA 的功利主义观点也可以非常广泛。帮助技术人员捐款的组织 Founder's Pledge 的大卫·戈德堡（David Goldberg）预计，动物福利资金将大幅增加。捐赠者可能会支持旨在防止快速生长的肉鸡因自身重量而瘫痪，以及大规模人道电击昏迷鱼类的项目。大型资助者还将资金投入到旨在提高人们对未来预测能力的项目，以及富裕西方国家的“YIMBY”（Yes In My Backyard）亲住房改革项目中（有些人对此是否属于慈善活动持有异议）。他们专注于将资金投入到能够衡量结果的项目，这导致他们忽视了诸如女性赋权或文化遗产保护等事业。

在 EA 捐赠者中，影响最深远的信念或许与 AI 相关。一些人担心那些可能性低但影响巨大的风险，例如人类灭绝。伯格先生（Mr Berger）表示，Coefficient Giving（原 Open Philanthropy）自 2015. 年以来一直资助关于失控 所带来的“生存风险”的研究。Anthropic 和 OpenAI 在一定程度上受到 EA 观点的影响，其成立初衷就是为了安全地构建 。Anthropic 的内部哲学家阿曼达·阿斯凯尔（Amanda Askell）长期以来一直与该运动相关联。她的前夫威尔·麦考斯基尔（Will MacAskill）是 EA 的创始人及其精神领袖。

因此，一部分 慈善资金将被用于那些帮助他们创造财富的聊天机器人。7 月，Coefficient Giving 宣布向 Resolution 捐赠 1.6亿美元，后者是一个当时成立仅一个月、专注于使 与人类价值观“对齐”的团体。OpenAI 基金会控制着估计 4300亿美元 慈善资金中的一半以上，且并未定义为 EA 机构，其使命是“确保通用人工智能造福全人类”。它将向关于超智能后未来的研究投入巨资。

这种方法带有风险。首先，关于安全 的研究很难衡量。捐赠者承认，人类灭绝没有“反事实”可循，因此很难知道耗资可能达数十亿加元的对齐研究是否有效，或者同样的结局是否可以用更少的钱来实现。这似乎削弱了“有效”捐赠的核心动力——即基于证据。其他与 相关的捐赠，尤其是如果它不符合 EA 导向，可能会像是在为科技行业购买好感，或者是试图增加其产品的使用率。今年夏天，OpenAI 基金会向使用其技术的社区团体捐赠了 5000万美元。

另一个挑战是确保这波捐赠用于拯救生命，而不是为朋友提供工作岗位。随着大量资金涌入，新的慈善机构正在成立，现有机构则在增加员工人数并提高薪资。然而，非营利组织在硅谷并不受欢迎。在科技圈拥有大量追随者的经济学家泰勒·科文（Tyler Cowen）认为，“非营利组织并非一种设计良好的组织形式”，因为它们往往会导致激励机制匮乏和官僚机构臃肿。他指出，最顶尖的人才可能会在AI实验室领取高薪，而不是在非营利组织工作。

一些富豪，如埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk），认为问题通过初创公司能得到更好的解决。（他还削减了美国对外援助机构——美国国际开发署（USAID）运行的项目。）罗宾逊先生表示，资助者正在寻找“一种不同类型的非营利组织工作人员”，或许需要具备科技创业者的特质。他说：“非营利组织获得更好的资金支持，意味着顶尖人才不再觉得必须冒财务不稳定的风险才能产生影响力。”为了吸引和留住人才，Coefficient Giving 今年将其技术AI人员的薪资提高了 30%。

捐出去，现在就捐出去

最后的障碍是确保资金能够被支出，而且要快。捐赠的总额将几乎完全取决于两家公司——Anthropic和OpenAI的估值，而这两家公司的估值有时看起来并不稳固。此外，伯格先生表示，这些估算“在很大程度上依赖于人们对自己计划扩大规模或支出速度的口头承诺”。硅谷的许多人通过捐赠者建议基金（DAF）进行捐赠，这种账户允许捐赠者预先获得税收减免（例如在大型IPO之前），然后再决定如何将资金捐出。目前已有约$326bn资金在美国的DAF中未被动用。戈德堡先生表示，当这类工具由企业赞助时，可能会激励慈善资金的囤积。

然而，AI慈善家们充满了紧迫感。“在之前的几波慈善浪潮中，很多人只是大谈特谈，但并不总能落实，”阿拉迪斯先生说。他认为这种情况不太可能重演，部分原因是某些新富阶层“对自己财富增长的速度感到困惑”，因此可能会同样迅速地将其捐出。Anthropic的员工已经在出售他们在DAF中持有的一部分股权，以启动捐赠；其中一人解释说，他尽早捐款是为了帮助非营利组织扩大规模。

其他人则坚信AI很快将改变世界，消除疾病和贫困。Coefficient Giving在今年上半年发放了10亿美元，几乎与2025.全年的捐赠额相当。7月，它将之前对另一家慈善机构GiveWell的承诺增加了六倍，达到10亿美元，部分原因是基于一种乐观的信念：现在必须迅速行动以拯救生命，因为在未来，可能不再有需要拯救的生命。兰索霍夫女士表示，在这样一个世界里，慈善的目标将从确保人们生存（无论是面对疾病还是失控的AI）转向帮助他们繁荣。她说，这将意味着捐赠者会开始询问关于生命意义、美感和美学的“更模糊的问题”。也许最终真的会出现新的音乐厅。■

大人物

美国，三波慈善浪潮中预计捐赠给慈善机构的资金，按捐赠者分，占GDP的百分比

img-83.jpeg

*非流动性慈善资本；假设Anthropic和OpenAI的估值为10亿美元 来源：福布斯；南·兰索霍夫；《经济学人》

58 国际

将台湾的民主视为人质

自私的政治人物正使台湾变得日益难以治理。中国是唯一的赢家

习近平为了夺取台湾愿意枪杀多少孩子？这座岛上的年轻人有着在感到被统治者背叛时发起大规模抗议的记录。想象一下，在亲绥的台湾精英促成下，中国进行强制接管。届时将由谁的军队清理街道，又将使用怎样的致命武力？

中国的征服者是否会利用公开审判来告诫台湾公众，自治已经结束，随之而来的还有他们 30 年的多党民主实验？中国已经准备好了一项法律工具：2005 年通过的《反分裂国家法》，准备用于对付“顽固的台独分子”。对于在过去三次总统选举中获胜的台湾民主进步党（DPP）来说，这种说法令人不寒而栗。民进党强调台湾的独立身份，并反对中国对该岛的主权主张。中国官员称台湾总统赖清德为叛国老鼠。《反分裂国家法》中最严重的指控（如“分裂国家”）可处以死刑。

台湾的公务员又将如何？为了确保符合中国的既定目标，即在台湾成为中华人民共和国的一个地区后，只有那些“支持国家统一”的人才能担任公职，会有多少人被监禁或解雇？先例已经存在。在 2019 年反政府抗议席卷香港之后，该地区的中国统治者要求当地官员和政治人物宣誓效忠，否则将被清洗。

中国官员谈到了在征服后的台湾开展再教育运动的必要性。在拥有 2300 万人口的岛屿上，调查一致显示绝大多数公众支持某种形式的自治，届时数百万人可能不得不参加再教育。此外，还有台湾世界领先的半导体产业，它生产了全球 90% 以上的最先进芯片。熟练的工程师实现了这种高科技魔力。如果他们试图逃离，中国是否会将他们锁在晶圆厂里？

当外部人士研究可能的台湾危机时，他们通常权衡中国入侵或封锁的风险。这很自然。如果美国介入保卫该岛，两个拥有核武器的超级大国将陷入战争。但另一个场景也值得研究。如果台湾最终被诱导在不经战斗的情况下投降——这是中国的明确偏好——习近平及其下属将面临一系列可怕的选择。为了摧毁台湾的自由，可能需要采取残酷的镇压，而这将引起全世界的关注。对于台湾的政治人物来说，结论应该是显而易见的。他们的民主不仅是对蒋介石（中国内战的失败者，于 1949 年逃亡至此）之后统治该岛的独裁制度的改进，他们的政治体制本身就是一种威慑。

台湾迫切需要更多能让习近平犹豫不决的因素。中国并不害怕台湾的武装部队，尽管民进党正试图推动其早已过期的现代化进程。台湾传统的保护者美国是一个不可靠的朋友。唐纳德·特朗普总统同意了创纪录的对台军售，但他也嘲笑台湾在强大的中国面前火力不足。在 5 月于北京与习近平会谈后，特朗普呼应了中国的论调，称赖总统是一个可能会引发战争的鲁莽之辈。

遗憾的是，自私的政治人物非但没有珍视台湾的民主，反而正在破坏它。由于 2024 年的一场势均力敌的选举导致民进党控制总统职权和行政部门，而由国民党（蒋介石的继承者）领导的反对派控制议会，党派斗争使政府工作陷入瘫痪。

许多国家都有糟糕的政治人物，但台湾的政治人物因其不负责任而显得尤为突出。责任并非由一方承担。赖总统十分固执，不像他的前任蔡英文那样咨询国民党温和派的意见。但反对派也引发了一场持续的宪政危机。国民党立法委员及其盟友数月来一直拖延政府预算，其中包括购买美国武器的资金。他们还阻挠宪法法院的司法任命，导致法院规模缩减到现有法官甚至无法就其是否已达到处理政府僵局所需的法定人数达成一致。

在一次戏剧性的自残行为中，反对派阻挠了启动国内无人机产业的计划，该计划原定订购 210,000 架海空无人机。台湾需要无人机，且擅长电子产品，还可以向那些渴望获得非中国设备的西方国家出口。然而，由国民党主导的预算争端导致新的无人机订单最早要到明年才能落实。在访问台湾期间，本专栏作家邀请国民党高层对此做出解释。他们表示：“哦，我们支持无人机制造，这只是政治问题。”一位大员私下坦言：“国民党立法委员担心政府会将无人机资金拨给向民进党金库捐款的公司。”当被问及亲国民党的公司是否能制造无人机时，这位大员叹了口气。这位内部人士解释道，亲国民党的公司通常在中国有投资，因此不敢这样做：该党更倾向于不面对这一困境。

分而治之

民进党（DPP）政治人物谴责国民党（KMT）主席程丽稳，因为她宣称台湾不能依赖美国，因此需要加强与中国的关系。当她在4月在北京与习近平举行友好会晤时，民进党人士对此感到愤怒。程女士坚称，她的目标是避免战争，而非出卖台湾。民进党内部人士指称，她党内的某些人实际上充当了中国的“代理人”。毫无疑问，台湾是中国影响力行动的目标。但这些行动是否奏效尚不明确。即便如此，台湾最年轻的一代正对政治感到幻灭，投票意愿降低。与此同时，该群体正受到大陆支持的社交媒体的轰炸，这些媒体嘲讽台湾的民主体制混乱。

功能失调正在损害台湾。台湾从独裁走向开放社会的历程改变了其国际地位。但外界对台湾民主的热爱不能超过其自身政治人物的热爱。台湾的自由应当是一项优势，能够增加中国接管的成本。令人遗憾的是，这些自由正遭到内部的背叛。■

59

商业

img-85.jpeg

胚胎筛选

婴儿产业

旧金山与纽约

硅谷希望重塑人类的诞生方式

去年年底，纽约人注意到地铁上出现了一系列奇怪的广告。其中一条承诺：“让您拥有最完美的宝宝”；另一条则指出：“智商 50% 取决于遗传”。不出所料，这些广告引发了争议。然而，这些广告背后的胚胎筛选初创公司 Nucleus 的 Kian Sadeghi 对此感到满意。“这是一款大众市场产品。除了地铁，还有什么更好的方式能证明它是一款大众市场产品呢？”

Nucleus 是越来越多推动这项新兴技术的硅谷初创公司之一。竞争对手 Orchid 的 Noor Siddiqui 喜欢说：“性是为了娱乐；胚胎筛选是为了孩子。”另一家竞争对手 Herasight 去年开始提供一项筛选服务，允许父母检查胚胎患各种疾病的风险，并估算其身高、智力和寿命——费用最高可达 $50,000。Nucleus 则在其中加入了头发和眼睛的颜色。这个新兴产业渴望重塑人类的诞生方式。

并非所有人都对此感到满意。在包括英国在内的许多司法管辖区，对胚胎进行性别筛选，更不用说针对高血压等多基因状况或身高等身体特征的筛选，都是违法的。许多遗传学家和医生团体对该技术的有效性持怀疑态度。另一些人则认为这是不道德的。

这些初创公司的愿景可能看起来像来自另一个世界。但变革正在迅速到来。资金正大量涌入生育研究，可能导致基因检测技术的快速进步。多基因筛选（尤其是针对常见疾病的筛选）在美国人中很受欢迎，近四分之三的人表示，如果他们已经在进行体外受精（IVF），他们会使用这项技术。一场关于这些技术及其推广企业的未来之争正在酝酿之中。

目前，只有极小比例的婴儿是通过 IVF 出生的，而 IVF 是胚胎筛选的必要条件。在 2024, 年（有数据可查的最近一年），美国有 100,000 名婴儿是通过该过程创造的，占总数的 2.8%。投资者、前执业生殖内分泌学家 David Sable 表示，全球生育市场的年价值通常被估计仅为 250亿美元-300亿。

然而，硅谷对生育的兴趣可能会扩大 IVF 的普及程度。几年前，彼得·蒂尔（Peter Thiel）和埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）开始将低出生率视为对美国的威胁，并开始向生育初创公司投入资金。其他投资者也加入了进来。根据数据提供商 PitchBook 的数据，尽管此后有所放缓，但美国风险投资（VC）在生育企业上的投资在 2019 年至 2022, 年间几乎翻了一番，从 2.54亿美元 跃升至 4.96亿美元。

许多这类初创公司专注于 ▶

→ 本节其他内容

61 巴特尔比：快乐假期

62 日本苦苦支撑的初创公司

63 中国的酒吧生意

63 篮球的大交易

64 英伟达 v 超大规模云服务商

65 熊彼特：AI 的狂野前沿

60 商业

► 降低 IVF 的成本。目前，只有 15 个美国州要求将该治疗纳入健康保险的产前福利，这意味着大多数美国人需要自费。为了降低成本，一些初创公司正在销售生育保险和付款计划。其中一家公司 Gaia 的 Nader al-Salim 表示，其服务通过风险共担，在整个生育过程中平均为患者节省了 $15,000。

Sable 博士认为，如果 IVF 真的变得更加普及，该市场年规模可能会增长到 4000亿美元-5000亿。他的估算是基于整个过程的成本将降至 $15,000 左右；而目前，在美国仅一次 IVF 周期就需花费 $15,000-20,000. Sable 博士认为，得益于可能提高成功率的技术创新，价格将会下降，从而使人们减少经历周期的次数。自动化带来的劳动力成本下降、规模经济以及更高程度的标准化也将有所帮助。

一些筛查在体外受精（IVF）患者中已经很普遍。例如 PGT-A，它用于检查胚胎是否具有正确数量的染色体，一些研究声称这能降低流产风险（许多专家对此持怀疑态度）。某些诊所还提供 PGT-M，用于检查由单个基因引起的疾病，例如囊性纤维化或亨廷顿舞蹈症。

完美的负担

现在，初创公司正在增加第三道筛选：PGT-P。它会对由多个基因决定的状况和特质对胚胎进行评分，范围可能从某些癌症到眼睛颜色以及智商（IQ）。对此类检测的需求可能十分巨大。2023年发表在《科学》（Science）杂志上的一项调查发现，只要安全且免费，43%的所有体外受精（IVF）参与者将使用多基因筛选，以增加孩子进入顶尖大学的机会。三分之一的人对基因编辑持有同样看法。

以技术从业者亚瑟·齐（Arthur Zey）及其丈夫、教师蔡斯·波普（Chase Popp）为例。齐先生表示，他一直是个“技术宅”，希望将自己的技能应用于生育孩子的过程中。“在我职业生涯的大部分时间里，我一直担任技术产品经理，所以从某种程度上说，这就像是管理另一个产品，”他说。今年早些时候，这对夫妇通过 Herasight 提供的多基因筛选结果，从六个胚胎中选择了一个，并由此生下了一个儿子。这让他们能够看到单基因疾病的风险评分以及 12 种多基因疾病的风险评分。这家初创公司还为他们提供了智商和身高的预测范围。

齐先生和波普先生表示，他们希望最大化儿子的寿命，而不是身高或智商。然而，齐先生知道身材高大和聪明是有优势的。“我能做的就是查看我那六个胚胎的结果，然后说：‘好吧，看来这一个更好。’”

目前，齐先生和波普先生的情况并不普遍。商业化的 PGT-P 筛选是一个小众产业。像 Herasight 这样的初创公司服务于一小部分通常非常富有的群体，且主要分布在美国。即便如此，这并未能阻止他们招致大量批评。

一些担忧集中在底层科学上。多基因风险评分基于全基因组关联研究（GWAS），该研究利用大规模人群的数据，试图辨别遗传变异与特定状况和特质之间的关联。提供筛选服务的公司声称，通过将胚胎的基因组与源自这些数据库的风险评分进行比较（有时会根据祖先和家族史进行调整），可以让他们得出个体评估。

然而，这一点存在争议。都柏林圣三一学院的凯文·米切尔（Kevin Mitchell）指出，虽然基于多基因风险评分的选择在大量后代中有效（如动物育种），但对于单个孩子是否能产生预期结果则不那么确定。

Herasight 试图通过使用 GWAS 数据集中的兄弟姐妹数据来验证其风险评分，以确保其模型在单个家庭内部仍具有预测价值，从而解决这一问题。该公司声称，如果为一对父母均患有 2 型糖尿病的夫妇测试 10 个胚胎，可以将孩子患该病的绝对风险从 40-60% 的基准降低 12-20 个百分点。

一些人认为，胚胎筛选带来的益处被夸大了。根据 2019, 年发表在《细胞》（Cell）杂志上的一篇论文，基于当时的技术，如果父母从 10 个可行胚胎中挑选，孩子身高的中位数增幅将是 2. 9厘米。如果他们选择智商，增幅将是 3 分——不太可能改变人生。此外，对于在少于 5 个胚胎中进行选择的人来说，预期收益会骤降。牛津大学的达根·威尔斯（Dagan Wells）补充道，对于许多状况而言，基因的重要性低于饮食等环境因素。

剔除某些特质也可能产生意想不到的后果。遗传物质在身体的不同部位可能产生不同的影响，这种现象被称为“基因多效性”（pleiotropy）。如果父母选择胚胎是为了降低孩子患某种疾病的风险，他们可能会忽视或加剧那些服务提供商没有（或无法）提供评分的问题。

然而，许多技术问题，尤其是某些人群中训练数据的匮乏，应随时间而改善。《细胞》（Cell）杂志的一篇论文估计，增加底层数据库的样本量可以将多基因评分带来的智商中位数增益提高一倍。针对多基因多效性，一些研究表明，大多数多基因疾病对之间的遗传相关性要么是正相关——这意味着降低一种疾病的概率会降低其他疾病的概率——要么是不显著。特里尼蒂学院的米切尔博士表示，目前这项技术“有点像一张期票”。“他们说，‘相信我们，现在这东西有点烂，但很快就会变好。’”

如果技术问题得到解决，伦理问题将会增加。一些反对者担心，筛选初创公司正在推广一种更温和的优生学。另一些人则担心，胚胎编辑——美国自2016年起事实上已禁止该行为——可能会成为下一步。

业内人士拒绝这种担忧，有时措辞十分直白。Founders Fund的德利安·阿斯帕鲁霍夫（Delian Asparouhov）表示，风险评分可能并不完美，但它们是“同类最佳”。

img-86.jpeg

商业 61

Founders Fund是一家由蒂尔先生共同创立的风险投资公司，已投资于多家生育初创公司。他继续说道：“我讨厌传统医疗行业和遗传咨询师的一些做法，他们会说，‘你需要拥有哈佛临床级别的执照’才能解读遗传数据。去他的吧，我只想要最好的统计模型。我不需要博士学位来阅读这些东西。”（Herasight、Nucleus和Orchid都配备了遗传咨询师来引导客户解读结果。）至于伦理问题，阿斯帕鲁霍夫认为，所有准父母在选择伴侣时都在进行某种形式的遗传选择。他辩称：“如果这算优生学，那么Hinge（社交软件）也一样。”

大多数提供PGT-P服务的公司则更为谨慎。他们表示，客户主要是在寻找确保孩子健康的方法，而不是为了创造“超级婴儿”。然而，他们决定提供智力评分和审美特征评分，这表明他们意识到后者存在市场。

关于一小批初创公司未来的争论似乎是一个小众关注点。但如果体外受精（IVF）变得更便宜，且遗传数据更加丰富（这看起来很有可能），那么胚胎筛选业务将只会增长——随之而来的将是更激烈的争论。生育行业近50年的历史充满了曾经被认为具有争议的技术，包括IVF。从这个意义上说，Nucleus、Orchid和Herasight等初创公司并非新鲜事。■

巴特勒（BARTLEBY）

度假的六个阶段

两周的假期，但真正放松的有几天？

现在是夏天，至少在北半球是这样，这意味着办公室里的人少了，机场里的人多了。理论上，度假是彻底放松的时间。但在实践中，在那个时刻到来之前，需要经历几个阶段；而在你完全重新投入工作之前，还需要经历另外几个阶段。

准备阶段。 你极度需要一次假期。在离开前的最后两天里，你完成了最紧急的任务，比如整理办公桌。你告诉团队成员你完全信任他们，但紧接着又说，如果发生任何事情，无论多么琐碎，都应该联系你。结果，他们一点也不觉得被信任。你考虑设置一个自动回复邮件，但决定不这么做：偶尔检查一下手机真的没什么问题。当你离开办公室时，你觉得自己快要感冒了。

拼命放松阶段。 在度假的前几天，你对待假期就像对待工作一样。你花大量时间询问 AI 模型那些冷门的小众去处。在典型的某个早晨，你开车两小时去一家由 ChatGPT 推荐的地方吃早餐，结果发现那里关门了，然后你参观了一家致力于古老腌鱼工艺的博物馆。

午餐时，你喝了酒然后睡着了。你将这段失去意识的时间视为本可以用来放松的时间。你敏锐地意识到时间的流逝，自由的日子正在悄悄溜走。你拿起一本书，但没有阅读，而是担心自己是否可以用更悠闲的方式来享受闲暇。对于一个度假的人来说，你感到非常紧张。

放手阶段。 与此同时，你时不时检查电子邮件，并干预一些你根本不需要参与的事情。

你收到几条 WhatsApp 消息，被要求参加一个电话会议，你感到既恼火又欣慰。难道没有我你们就办不成吗？没有我你们确实办不成！当你对消息进行分诊，将它们分为必须快速处理的和可以等待的，你逐渐意识到每周发生的事情中，有多少 a) 完全不需要你，以及 b) 没有持久价值。你开始忽略大多数消息；如果很重要，他们会想办法联系你的。你开启了自动回复邮件。

幻想阶段。 终于，你开始放松了。你多睡了一会儿。你看手机的次数减少了。你意识到在办公室里，每周一次的销售会议此时此刻正在进行，你对着旧生活的渺小大笑出声。很快，你开始脱离现实。你想搬到目前所在的这个地方，却忘记了你之所以感到愉快，是因为天气很好且不需要工作。你开始试图计算自己多久能退休。你幻想在户外工作，也许是划海边皮划艇，或者对干石墙做一些手工活。

动力阶段。 假期即将结束。你意识到划海边皮划艇会让你起水泡，而且你最擅长的事情并不涉及干石墙。你开始重新查看电子邮件，但只看那些重要的。你感到回公司工作的动力在增加。你已经看到了多少时间被浪费在无关紧要的事情上，并决心更加冷酷地确定优先级。关于如何改进每周销售会议，你产生了一些非常棒的想法。

惯犯阶段。 你精力充沛地回到办公室。你看上去和感觉起来都比同事们更健康。然后，同样的对话重复了 800 次。“假期怎么样？”“太棒了。”“去哪儿了？”[插入答案]。“在那儿做了什么？”[插入细节]。你很快意识到没有人对你去哪里感兴趣，于是开始编造回答。“去哪儿了？”“瓦坎达。”“做了什么？”“我们参观了振金矿山。”“噢，我一直想去那里。”

见到人们的感觉很好。拥有目标感也很不错。但你很快就会回到旧习惯中。一个空白的日程表感觉不像是在进行残酷的优先级排序，而更像是在公开展示自己的多余；那些时间槽很快又被填满了。当电子邮件发来时，你会不加区分地回复。你的办公桌变得更加凌乱。你参加每周的销售会议，隐约记得自己曾经有一个改进会议的想法。同事们从各自的假期中回来，你询问他们的假期如何。你并没有在听答案。他们看起来状态极佳，精力充沛。你觉得自己又要感冒了。你非常需要一次假期。

62 商业

日本初创企业

按下重启键

东京

这个国家能否再次成为初创企业的避风港？

物理学毕业生森田昭夫（MORITA AKIO）在1946.共同创立了东京电信工程株式会社，这是一家电子制造商。这家初创企业的20名员工在东京一家被燃烧弹炸毁的百货公司的小房间里辛勤工作，手工制作电热垫和电压表。凭借决心和机敏，该公司发展成为了如今价值$140bn的电子巨头——索尼（Sony）。其他著名的日本公司也有类似的逆境奋斗史，例如同样成立于1946,一家废墟工厂中的本田（Honda），或者更近期的软银（SoftBank），后者始于1981年，最初是由24岁-year-old的孙正义经营的一家小型软件分销商。然而，在近几十年里，日本失去了产生具有影响力的初创企业的诀窍。

根据研究公司CB Insights的数据，目前全球1,400家独角兽企业（估值超过$1bn的初创企业）中，只有六家诞生于日本。该国尚未产生过“十角兽”（估值超过$10bn的初创企业）。韩国和澳大利亚分别培育了五家和六家，且按人口比例计算，独角兽企业的数量也领先于日本（见图表）。在国家支持下，新一批风险投资家和企业家正试图扭转这一局面。他们将不得不面对三个问题。

第一个问题是日本缺乏敢于冒险的风险资本。十年前，传统的风险投资（VC）基金十分罕见。根据数据公司Pitchbook的数据，2015年投入到不足500笔交易中的风险资本仅为10亿美元。尽管到2025,风险投资的筹资额已增长至约60亿美元，但与澳大利亚等市场相比仍不理想——后者的经济规模仅为日本的一半，但去年筹集了50亿美元。看似是日本初创企业天然支持者的机构，如软银的风投部门，将其绝大部分资金投入到了海外公司。

可用资金在公司发展的不同阶段分布不均。“缺乏后期风险资本是一个巨大的制约因素，”东京风险投资公司MPower Partners的村上由美子（Murakami Yumiko）表示。另一家风投机构Side Stage Ventures指出，日本在早期融资（即交易额低于$15m的交易）方面位居全球前十，但在规模更大的后期交易方面仅排在第16位。反过来，风险投资管线中缺乏有前景的公司，限制了全球投资者的兴趣，而这类投资者更有可能在公司融资旅程的后期进行如此大额的投资。

第二个问题是日本的

初创企业概况

每百万人口拥有的独角兽企业*数量 选定国家，最新数据†

img-88.jpeg

来源：CB Insights；联合国 *估值在 10亿美元 或以上的初创公司 †2007-26, 人口数据 2025

初创企业上市过快。一家有前景的年轻公司通常被期望冲向首次公开募股（IPO）。自疫情以来，在日本已退出的初创企业中，有 57% 是通过这种方式上市的，而美国和英国的这一比例分别为 23% 和 13%。这在一定程度上是由于并购（M&A）太少造成的，而并购是全球大多数初创企业套现的主要方式。需要流动资金的企业被推向上市。投资者打趣说，在日本上市相当于美国的“B轮”融资——即第二次小规模的资金注入，通常用于扩大规模。

尽管如此，一些公司依然蓬勃发展。总部位于东京的另一家风险投资公司 Coral Capital 的 James Riney 认为，日本拥有许多“隐藏的独角兽”，它们在过早上市后最终估值超过了 10亿美元。但更多时候，来自风投公司要求快速上市的压力，分散了管理层构建长期增长的注意力。结果导致出现了大量规模微小且停滞不前的上市企业。在 2025 年底，在东京证券交易所（TSE）“成长”市场首次亮相的公司，其中位值仅为微不足道的 100亿人民币 (6100万美元)。对于失败的首次亮相，惩罚并不严重。宽松的退市规则使得这些企业小鱼能够在公开市场中苟延残喘。

过早上市的冲动部分也是由于初创企业的文化地位较低——这是阻碍该国企业家的第三个因素。根据研究联盟全球创业观察（Global Entrepreneurship Monitor）的一项调查，社会对风险的厌恶意味着只有 24% 的日本人认为创业是一项理想的职业，而全球平均水平为 67%。初创企业的创始人及其员工，尤其是那些辞去安稳工作的人，面临着来自家人和朋友的质疑。其中一个结果就是强化了冲向 IPO 的趋势。“污名化迫使创始人选择上市，”另一家总部位于东京的风投公司 Antler Japan 的 Jordan Fisher 表示。

在这三个方面，情况都在改善。在 AI 热潮的推动下，本土独角兽企业有所增加。去年，模型开发商 Sakana AI 成为日本最有价值的独角兽，估值达 26亿美元。政府也提供了一些帮助。在 2022 年，政府启动了一项雄心勃勃的计划以培育新企业，包括动用公共资金并设立一名负责初创企业的部长。今年5月，该国经济部门发布了新指南，鼓励初创企业考虑将收购作为退出选项。这些关注改善了初创企业的形象。一位创始人指出，年轻员工越来越倾向于在快速发展的新公司工作，而不是在他们父母工作的那种死板且基于资历的公司。

有益的是，东京证券交易所已开始打击规模微小且表现不佳的公司。去年，它宣布了一项计划，将对上市五年后无法维持 100亿人民币 市值的公司进行退市，而之前的标准是 10 年内维持 40亿人民币，不过该规则直到 2030 年才会生效。“我们希望让（IPO）成为起点，而不是终点，”该交易所负责人 Yamaji Hiromi 表示。

日本仍有很长的路要走。Fisher 先生指出，拥有一家在全球规模运营的“十角兽”企业，可能会创造出一个有动力收购有前景年轻公司的买家，他将其与硅谷巨头收购由前员工创立的初创公司进行了对比。日本20世纪的初创先驱们从微末之始建立了庞大的企业。如今的创始人需要同样的动力才能走向成功。■

商业 63

img-90.jpeg

蜜雪冰城

营业时间

LUSHUI

全球最大的快餐连锁店进军酒吧业

即便在中国最偏远的角落，一杯泡沫丰富的福鹿家（Fulujia）啤酒也在等着你。这家公司（其名称译为“Lucky Deer”）自2021,年以来已在全国开设了3,200多家小型酒吧，使其成为全球最大的酒吧连锁店。比其规模更令人印象深刻的是其价格。无论是在大城市还是边境小镇，一品脱啤酒的价格低至5.9元（$0.87）。

福鹿家的店面是规模虽小但统一的微型饮水穴，提供20种生啤，并设有精致的就座区。它们通常销售炸猪肉和毛豆等酒吧小吃。当被问及价格为何如此之低时，位于深西南地区 Lushui 镇一家新开业的福鹿家店主表示，这是因为该公司由蜜雪冰城（Mixue Bingcheng）所有，后者是一家在全球拥有约60,000家门店的茶饮和冷饮巨头。去年，它在门店数量上超过了美国汉堡巨头麦当劳，成为全球最大的快餐运营商。

蜜雪冰城在10月收购了福鹿家的控股权。两者都采用类似的特许经营模式。加盟商支付约60,000元的预付款，用于购买启动小型酒吧所需的一切设备，如啤酒泵和品牌装饰（但租金和装修费用不包括在内）。他们可免除三年的特许权使用费。

蜜雪冰城成功的秘诀在于其对供应链的掌控。它经常被描述为一家物流公司而非快餐连锁店。蜜雪冰城在物资运输方面的高效率使消费者的成本保持在极低水平——其招牌饮品是一杯四元的柠檬水。福鹿家使用相同的物流网络，将其啤酒从蜜雪冰城和福鹿家共同所在的河南省运送到加盟商手中。即使加盟商远在距离酿酒厂2,000km（2,）多公里的 Lushui，也不需要支付运输费用。

特许经营模式结合高效的供应链，极大地加速了蜜雪冰城门店的开设——2025.年平均每天出现约40家新店。福鹿家也产生了类似的效果。在其3,200家酒吧中，近三分之二是在蜜雪冰城去年底收购股份后开设的。这一模式似乎在集团的咖啡连锁店 Lucky Cup 上同样奏效，截至去年年底，该品牌在中国至少有10,000家店。

该模式在海外也取得了一定成功。蜜雪冰城在海外拥有约5,000家门店，使其成为迄今为止在国外最成功的中国快餐连锁店。它还在马来西亚和泰国开设了 Lucky Cup 分店。福鹿家尚未公布海外扩张计划。但考虑到纽约和伦敦的酒吧供应着价格昂贵得令人心痛的啤酒，廉价的中国酿造啤酒定会受到饮酒者的欢迎。

投资体育

跳投

洛杉矶

湖人队的出售凸显了体育投资热潮

对于一位亿万富翁投资者来说，如果最近试图购买国际足联（FIFA）世界杯股份的尝试以失败告终，什么样的安慰奖才算合格？答案是：迅速转向，转而抢购美国最值钱的篮球队伍之一——洛杉矶湖人队。

据内部人士透露，在 8 月 12 日宣布的一笔 125亿美元 的交易中，投资公司 Thrive Capital 的创始人约书亚·库什纳（Joshua Kushner）将成为湖人队的控股股东，而迪士尼前首席执行官鲍勃·艾格（Bob Iger）将担任其助手。这一价格创下了美国体育队伍的最高纪录，反映出机构投资者对体育特许经营权的狂热胃口。

这一金额比球队卖家马克·沃尔特（Mark Walter）大约一年前购买湖人队时支付的金额高出 25亿美元，而当时的金额在当时也创下了纪录。就在前一天，另一家资产管理公司阿波罗全球管理公司（Apollo Global Management）的一个部门表示，已为棒球队伍纽约洋基队的所有者提供了 26亿美元 的债务和股权支持。这是否意味着体育投资已经过热？

库什纳先生和艾格先生将购买湖人队比作得到了《蒙娜丽莎》。这支球队确实独一无二。没有哪支篮球队伍能像湖人队那样从当地广播权中获得如此高额的收入。根据媒体研究公司 Ampere Analysis 的数据，也没有任何一支美国体育队伍在国际知名度和粉丝群方面能与之匹敌。

篮球运动本身对投资者具有独特的吸引力。2024 年，美国职业篮球联赛（NBA）与包括迪士尼旗下的 ESPN 和 ABC 网络在内的几家广播公司协商达成了一项为期 11 年、总额 760亿美元 的全国媒体权利方案（该方案在艾格先生仍担任老板期间协商达成），为未来的广播收入提供了长期确定性。这项运动吸引年轻粉丝，比赛得分高且充满戏剧性，例如今年纽约尼克斯队在 NBA 总决赛中夺冠。其国际影响力也可能继续增长。明年，NBA 计划在欧洲启动一个由 16 支球队组成的联赛。

但库什纳先生也正处于调整期。他试图主导一项 42亿美元 的投资，投向世界足球管理机构国际足联（FIFA）的商业部门，但在世界杯可能被出售引发全球抵制后，该计划以惨败告终。在遭到拒绝几天后，他

64 商业

和艾格先生将尝试在拉斯维加斯建立一支新篮球队伍的计划，改为购买湖人队。他们的投资将由 Thrive Eternal 提供支持，这是一个长期投资工具，专注于库什纳公司认为能够抵御 AI 颠覆的企业（以防万一，Thrive 也是 OpenAI 的大投资者）。

这种逻辑听起来很合理。但即使没有竞价战，他给湖人队的估值也是另一组投资者去年为波士顿凯尔特人队（美国最值钱的篮球队伍之一）支付金额的两倍多。这听起来过于奢侈。

如果 NBA 批准这笔交易，沃尔特先生将赚得盆满钵满。但目前尚不清楚他为何如此急于出售湖人队。显然，他将保留棒球队伍洛杉矶道奇队的控股权，以及在其他几支大型体育队伍中的巨额投资。新闻机构彭博社（Bloomberg）报道称，由于联邦调查人员正在审查其公司 TWG Global 获得并记录在沃尔特保险公司账上的贷款，该公司正试图筹集资金。据称他的健康状况也不佳。或许他只是看到了快速套现的好处。■

英伟达与超大规模云服务商

硅谷对决

芯片设计商及其最大客户之间正渐行渐远

英伟达（Nvidia）与超大规模云服务商（hyperscalers）——如亚马逊、谷歌、Meta和微软等云巨头——之间的关系曾经非常简单：英伟达设计并供应芯片，超大规模云服务商利用这些芯片构建数据中心。目前，双方仍然相互需要（见图表）。然而，双方都在为一个彼此依赖程度降低的未来做准备。

分离的迹象在8月10日显现，当时英伟达宣布与包括贝莱德（BlackRock）和高盛（Goldman Sachs）在内的六家华尔街最大投资者建立合作伙伴关系，旨在“动员超过$500”用于AI基础设施。其目的是帮助那些借贷成本高于谷歌或微软的客户（如规模较小的AI实验室和企业）筹集构建数据中心所需的海量资金。根据该计划，该财团将从机构投资者那里筹集资金池，并以具有吸引力的利率将其贷给英伟达的客户，用于购买英伟达设备构建基础设施。基础设施成本极其昂贵：一个大型数据中心的成本约为$50。大多数公司并不需要如此大规模的设施，但无论规模如何，成本都非常高昂。

英伟达采取的方法是将算力作为抵押品，从而允许机构投资者参与。其中一个挑战是处理器有使用寿命，通常为四到五年，这使得针对其发放的贷款在估值上变得复杂。另一个挑战是，如果需求未能实现，基础设施将如何处理。英伟达的应对措施是通过一种机制为项目成本提供高达四分之一的担保，如果抵押贷款的资产价值低于某个特定数值，该公司将承担相应责任。对于一家以技术工程著称的公司来说，这是一种精巧的金融工程。

此类举措在一定程度上是由一个明显迹象促使的，即英伟达的核心客户正在远离。超大规模云服务商不再满足于仅仅购买英伟达的芯片，而是投入数十亿加元设计自己的芯片。多年来，谷歌一直通过其云平台出租张量处理单元（TPU，一种专门的AI芯片）的访问权限。现在，它正向其他公司销售TPU系统。亚马逊将其定制芯片业务（主要与AI相关）的年化收入估计为$25。该公司首席执行官安迪·贾西（Andy Jassy）认为，这使其成为了全球三大数据中心芯片业务之一。微软和Meta也开发了芯片。两大AI实验室Anthropic和OpenAI也计划采取同样行动。

超大规模云服务商设计自有芯片有充分的理由。芯片占据了AI数据中心成本的大部分。经纪公司伯恩斯坦（Bernstein）估计，在一个运行英伟达H100芯片（单价$25,000）的服务器机架中，芯片支出占总成本的四分之三。定制芯片的成本仅为前者的五分之一到三分之一，尽管性能较低。云巨头们认为，他们每加元获得的计算能力仍然更高。定制芯片也更适合特定任务：例如，谷歌的TPU用于支撑其AI模型的计算，而Meta的处理器则用于推荐算法。

一些超大规模云服务商认为，定制芯片本身将成为一项巨大的业务。5月，谷歌与私募股权巨头黑石（Blackstone）合作成立了一家AI云公司，将出租基于谷歌芯片构建的算力。亚马逊也计划开展类似的风险投资。Anthropic和OpenAI打算使用亚马逊的Trainium处理器。这些举措可能会使定制芯片成为英伟达芯片的强劲竞争对手。研究公司彭博智能（Bloomberg Intelligence）估计，全球AI芯片出货量将从今年的约1500万颗增长到2030.的2800万颗。定制芯片将占据总量的49%，而英伟达将占据40%。英伟达在营收上可能仍将保持主导地位，但更便宜的定制芯片将对其丰厚的利润率造成压力。

英伟达（Nvidia）对此持有不同看法。其首席执行官黄仁勋认为，定制芯片最大的优势——专业化——同时也是其弱点：它适用于已知的工作负载，而非新任务。相比之下，英伟达的 GPU 几乎可以处理任何 AI 任务。随着 AI 从大语言模型扩展到机器人、自动驾驶汽车和工业应用，这种通用性可能会变得更加重要。

跟上英伟达的步伐可能也被证明既昂贵又困难。该公司现在的突破性芯片发布周期已从每两年一次缩短至每年一次。设计一款前沿 AI 芯片通常需要其他公司两到三年时间，且耗资 10亿美元-30亿。仅在上一季度，英伟达在研发上的支出就超过了 60亿美元。很少有公司拥有足够的资本和工程人才来维持这样的投入。英伟达还受益于能够自行设计芯片。那些将他人设计转化为最终产品的公司（如台湾芯片制造商台积电 TSMC）产能有限。美国银行的维韦克·阿尔亚（Vivek Arya）表示，云服务公司必须决定是将这种“宝贵的配额”用于自身需求还是客户需求。

除了针对超大规模云服务商（hyperscalers）捍卫其地位外，英伟达还希望鼓励其他业务。它希望向试图构建国内 AI 基础设施的政府、构建自有数据中心的公司以及出租 AI 计算能力的“新云”（neocloud）公司销售产品。

与华尔街的新合作伙伴关系是其帮助客户为 AI 投资提供融资的更广泛战略的一部分。7 月，英伟达启动了一项计划，从新云公司租赁未使用的计算能力，以换取未来的收入分成，从而使这些公司更容易借贷和扩张。据称，该公司还在讨论一项 3500亿美元 方案，以帮助 OpenAI 在俄亥俄州租赁数据中心并购买 GPU。英伟达对那些指称其交易等同于“循环融资”的说法十分敏感。该公司表示，最新的结构通过引入外部投资者，旨在解决这些顾虑。

金融投资者与供应商之间，以及客户与竞争对手之间的界限已经变得模糊。但每个人都在尽可能地购买计算能力。而英伟达依然供应着绝大部分。■

芯片份额

部分公司，按芯片设计商估算的累计计算能力*，百万单位 2022-25

img-91.jpeg

商业 65

法外之地

AI智能体撒谎、欺骗且偷窃。这正令用户望而却步

img-92.jpeg

故事中的铁丝网曾让已故的艾伦·格林斯潘（Alan Greenspan）产生一种奇特的兴趣，而他一生都生活在城市中。诚然，这位前美联储主席钦佩那些在美式资本主义黎明时分帮助开拓边疆的铁路公司、淘金者和“孤独的牛仔”。但在他身为经济学家的心中，他对铁丝网也情有独钟；他认为，铁丝网让随之而来的定居者能够保护自己的财产，从而提高了生产力。

与美国西部荒野一样，人工智能也有其开拓者。在美国，这个群体正在萎缩。Anthropic和OpenAI依然坚定地致力于推向AI的边界。而包括谷歌在内的其他科技巨头（谷歌曾是领跑者，但目前正以极快的速度流失前沿AI科学家）则在动摇。这些超大规模云服务商似乎发现，向其云客户销售AI基础设施，比将宝贵的算力挥霍在推进自有模型上更为获利。

AI目前缺乏的是足够的“定居者”。也就是说，能够充分利用AI智能体等产品，从而证明向前沿AI投入巨额资金具有合理性的个人和企业。他们望而却步的部分原因在于，就像在西部荒野一样，边疆生活充满了鲁莽。正如Anthropic和OpenAI最先进模型近期出现的“失控”事件所证明的那样，那些本应代表人类并在与人类价值观“对齐”的情况下工作的智能体，在必要时会撒谎、欺骗和偷窃。它们会摆脱禁锢，组成有害的团伙来伤害人类。如果可以的话，它们甚至会喝酒斗殴。

这种不可预测性让许多公司难以承受。“你只需要被蛇咬一次，就再也不会回头了，”试图帮助在混乱中建立秩序的互联网公司GoDaddy的贾里德·赛恩（Jared Sine）说道。对法律和秩序的需求正在催生一批新的AI基础设施公司。他们销售的不是芯片或算力——这些是AI淘金热中典型的“镐和铲”。他们提供针对网络威胁的保护，为不可信且难以捉摸的智能体提供修复方案，并在智能体失控时提供控制手段。换句话说，他们的业务就是“铁丝网”。

最直接的危险——以及机遇——领域是网络安全。近期对Anthropic和OpenAI模型黑客能力的测试显示，智能体会出现失控行为，如窃取凭据、创建虚假身份、建立秘密聊天室并掩盖行踪——这一切都令其人类评估员感到震惊和恐惧。毫无疑问，最先进的安全模型，如Anthropic的Claude Mythos 5和OpenAI的GPT 5.6-Cyber，也将帮助防御者。但加州大学伯克利分校的AI与网络安全专家宋晓东（Dawn Song）认为，目前权力天平仍坚定地倾向于攻击者。此外还有一个障碍。她说，如果组织采用自主智能体，将会增加黑客潜在的“攻击面”。

不断上升的风险解释了为什么具备AI能力的网络安全公司估值在飙升。两家最大的公司Palo Alto Networks和CrowdStrike的股价今年以来大致翻了一番。并购活动激增。在Alphabet以$32bn收购另一家网络安全公司Wiz的引领下，过去一年中已完成了超过$70bn的网络安全相关巨额交易。数据收集机构Pitchbook表示，AI相关的网络安全也是风险投资（VC）最热门的领域之一。

机遇不仅限于网络安全。在最近一次由宋女士组织、关于代理式人工智能（agentic AI）的会议上，本刊的客座专栏作家听到了一连串的抱怨，不仅涉及大语言模型（LLMs）在能力巅峰时可能带来的黑客攻击风险，还涉及它们在最糊涂时可能犯下的低级错误。一位专家展示了一张由代理生成的图表，用于衡量欧洲顶尖网球选手的收入。该图表错误地遗漏了世界排名第二的西班牙选手卡洛斯·阿尔卡拉斯（Carlos Alcaraz）。“这是网球，谁在乎呢？”他打趣道。但如果这是对一家公司的财务分析，情况就截然不同了。另一位专家则将大语言模型在量子物理方面的知识量，与其无法点一份卷饼（burrito）的无能进行了对比。

这些缺陷催生了吸引风险投资（VC）关注的另一类群体：那些承诺加强代理式人工智能“信任层”的公司。其中一家是 Cyera，其估值在 18 个月内翻了两番，达到 $12。该公司表示，缺乏信任在近期“阻碍”了人工智能的采用，并提供防止数据泄露和未经授权使用工具的服务。另一家是由伯克利教授丹·克莱因（Dan Klein）共同创立的 Scaled Cognition，该公司近期获得了 $100 的风险投资支持。克莱因先生将人工智能产生的某些错误称为“隐形错误”——这些错误看起来足够合理而容易被忽略，且在代理执行更长任务时会不断累积——该公司承诺通过在模型训练中加入可靠性保证来减少此类错误。其他初创公司则专注于创建用于衡量代理效能的评估体系、用于确定代理失控时责任归属的代理身份识别，以及带有紧急停止开关的控制系统。

一把代币

AI 在前沿领域还面临其他问题。就像美国西部大开发时期一样，这里竞争极其残酷。来自中国更廉价的开放权重模型的竞争压力巨大。8 月 10 日，马克·扎克伯格的 Meta 也加入了战局，发布了其最强大模型的开放权重版本，名为 Muse Glimmer。

前沿领域同样缺乏法律约束。人们对失控智能体（rogue agents）的担忧如此之深，以至于即使是领先 AI 实验室的高管也在呼吁特朗普政府扮演“治安官”的角色——尽管奇怪的是，政府对其最新的 AI 安全框架一直秘而不宣。然而，显而易见的是，在组织能够完全信任并采用智能体之前，需要更多的制衡机制。今年的 AI 流行词之一是“治理”（harness）——即围绕大语言模型（LLM）构建的系统，旨在确保智能体循规蹈矩。但这可能更像是一圈带刺的铁丝网。■

66

金融与经济

img-93.jpeg

石油市场

人民的石油

忘掉石油输出国组织（OPEC）吧。现在是由中国共产党说了算

伊朗战争造成了石油历史上最大的供应冲击。然而，即使在战斗最激烈的时期，油价也从未达到许多分析师在战争开始时预测的每桶 $150。对此，要感谢几个政府。在伊朗弹药导致霍尔木兹海峡无法通行，使每天 14m 桶（b / d）原油被困在海湾地区后不久，阿布扎比和利雅得的石油君主们指示通过绕过该通道的管道额外输送 5m b / d。华盛顿和东京的部长们释放了创纪录的 2m b / d 的应急储备；贫困国家的国家主导配给制度削减了部分需求。

但如果没有另一个首都——北京——悄悄做出的决定，灾难仍会发生。在 2 月至 6 月期间，中国将原油进口量削减了一半，即 5.5m b / d（见次页 chart 1 左栏）——专家认为，这足以让全球基准布伦特原油价格降低 $30 或更多。这超过了新冠疫情封锁期间全球需求下降 9m b / d 时全球跌幅的一半。与疫情期间全球经济陷入衰退不同，中国的 GDP 依然在稳步运行。它减少购买外国原油并非因为经济遭受打击。

这种能够在表面上以较低经济成本开启或关闭石油需求的能力，使得这个全球最大的石油进口国能够像石油输出国组织（OPEC）及其盟友长期以来通过控制全球一半产量来操纵价格那样操纵价格。随着该卡特尔因阿拉伯联合酋长国最近的退出以及剩余海湾成员国因战争而受限的产能而削弱，中国的市场权力正在增长。用一位石油贸易老板的话来说，“中国就是新的 OPEC”。

四十年来，OPEC 一直试图通过生产配额来维持高油价。相反，进口国无法通过配给需求来维持低价，因为买家比卖家分散得多，而且国内能源需求是无数个体的决策结果。庞大且国家主义的中国是个例外。而且与需要 21 个国家达成一致才能做出决定的 OPEC+ 不同，中国的中央计划者可以根据一个人——国家主席习近平的命令单方面采取行动。

中国使用三个主要杠杆来操纵石油市场。第一个是其国家石油储备。在截至 2026, 年初的 12 个月里，随着“超级过剩”的阴影压低原油价格，中国低价抢购了 200m 桶原油，补充了原本就已充足的 18m 桶储备。交易员估计，在伊朗战争爆发前，中国的采购可能使全球每桶油价增加了 $10-20。在中国 2 月进口的 11.6m b / d 中，多达 1m b / d 是超额采购，随后可以通过减少储备来放弃。

→ 本节其他内容

68 中国的新债务炸弹

68 新加坡的股市之梦

69 Buttonwood：指数基金是被动的吗？

70 特朗普与美联储（续）

71 自由交易：日元交易

金融与经济 67

一旦最后一批战前海湾货船在 4 月底抵达，中国便开始动用这些充盈的储备。根据数据公司 Vortexa 的数据，到 7 月，其库存已下降 70m 桶，这还不包括来自浮动仓储和隐藏洞穴的提取（见 chart 1, 右栏）。将这些计算在内，中国在这三个月内动用了 150m 桶原油，即每天约 1.5m b / d。

这其中大部分是商业库存——由大型石油公司追求利润的仓储部门持有——而非战略储备。价格报告机构 Argus Media 的汤姆·里德（Tom Reed）指出，炼油厂通常必须在一个月内补充其提取的量。但由于这些公司是国有的，且国家可以征用商业库存，因此推测该规定得到了豁免。

加上不再囤积的1m b / d和1.5m b / d的库存提取，库存管理可能解释了进口量5.5m b / d跌幅中的2.5m b / d。Vortexa的Emma Li认为，在北京的统治者开始担心库存水平低到令人不安之前，中国可以让这种情况持续另外四个月。

中国中央规划者的第二个杠杆是出口管制。作为全球第二大石油炼制国，中国通常是其亚洲邻国的主要燃料供应商。然而，在3月，政府命令国内炼油厂停止签署新的出口合同，并撤销许多已经达成的协议（见图表 2, 左栏）。在2月至4月期间，中国的精炼产品出口量下降了近一半，至430,000 b / d。这其中包括180,000 b / d的高精炼航空燃料，这为中国炼油厂节省了1.2m-1.8m b / d的原油。

限制对外销售让中国炼油厂能够将原本用于出口产品的部分原油，转化为其他关键产品，其中一些产品中国通常从海湾地区采购。例子包括石脑油和液化石油气（LPG）这两种石化原料，以及燃料油——那些资金短缺的小型炼油厂经常加工燃料油来代替

进口替代

中国

精炼油产品净出口，百万桶 / 日

img-94.jpeg

来源：Kpler, Argus Media

*新加坡产品价格减去迪拜原油价格 †中国产品价格减去布伦特原油价格

原油。炼油厂利润（出口利润高于国内销售利润）受到的打击是共产党可以承受的（见图表 2, 右栏）。

然而，充足的库存和限制出口并不能完全解释中国进口量的巨幅下降。中国政府还动用了第三个杠杆——抑制国内需求。6 月，中国炼油厂处理的原油比一年前减少了 2.7m b / d。汽油产量下降了 14%；柴油和航空燃料的产量均缩减了 21%。

深入分析证实，中国的汽车燃料使用量大幅下降。随着当局允许燃料价格上涨，许多城市居民已停止开车上班，转而选择地铁、自行车或出租车（其中许多是电池驱动的）。在 5 月为期一周的全国法定假期期间，高速公路沿线的电动汽车充电量比前一年增长了近 55%。火车正在弥补国内航班减少带来的缺口，后者的数量已被大幅削减。地方当局推迟了基础设施工程，从而节省了柴油。国际能源署（IEA）的官方预测员 Ciarán Healy 估计，在战争的前

img-95.jpeg

几个月里，中国的汽油和煤油消耗量比一年前减少了 10%。

作为全球最大的石化工业，中国的石化产业也在进行调整。去年，它将每天数百万桶的石脑油和液化石油气（LPG）——其中很多来自海湾地区——转化为聚合物（材料范围从 PVC 和合成橡胶到尼龙和聚酯），中国工厂按吨量使用这些材料。在缺乏海湾地区供应的原料，且政府下令优先保障燃料而非原料的情况下，石化公司转而寻找利用煤炭和乙烷（石油炼制的气态副产品）来制造部分聚合物的方法。

所有这些紧缩措施对中国经济的整体影响看起来是可控的。多年来国家支持的可再生能源和绿色交通投资使能源系统变得更加灵活。多年的“内卷”（激烈的竞争导致包括石化在内的行业出现产能过剩）使中国拥有大量未售出的聚合物及其下游产品库存。

这些缓冲地带解释了为什么生产者价格没有飙升，且消费者价格仍处于受控状态。尽管第二季度 GDP 增长了 4.3%，为 2022 年底以来最慢增速，但这更多是由于投资疲软和房地产危机的后遗症，而非石油短缺。牛津能源研究所（Oxford Institute for Energy Studies）这一智库的 Michal Meidan 指出，政府仍然可以动用其几乎未曾触及的战略石油储备。

中国的原油、燃料和聚合物库存虽然比外界意识到的要多，但也是有限的。一名分销商表示，他刚刚卖掉了一批自 2021 年起就积压在仓库里的聚乙烯货物。与原则上可以将减产维持数年的石油输出国组织（OPEC）不同，中国不能无限期地维持比平时少进口 5.5m b / d 的规模。但伊朗战争表明，在实践中，中国可以在数月的时间内单方面稳定全球石油市场。这个四分五裂的卡特尔组织的领导人们只能对此望洋兴叹。■

非购买力

中国

原油进口量，百万桶 / 日

img-96.jpeg

来源：Kpler, Vortexa

陆上原油库存，十亿桶

img-97.jpeg

68 金融与经济

中国债务

未爆弹

上海

负责化解信贷危机爆发的公司正陷入困境

7月下旬，中国东部安徽省的一家法院批准了一项不同寻常的重组方案。该方案涉及国后资产管理公司，这家金融公司最初成立的目的，是通过从陷入困境的贷款机构手中接手不良贷款，从而化解债务炸弹。国后公司是中国大型“债务炸弹处理小组”中首个自身需要被“化解”的成员。它绝不会是最后一个。

多年来，中国金融监管机构一直招募类似的公司来清理企业债务的雷区。在中国，这些拆弹专家被称为“资产管理公司”（AMC），首批四家专门的 AMC 于 1999 年在财政部下成立。其任务是救助四大国有商业银行。每家银行将其最难以维持的贷款（以及能力最差的员工）转移到各自的 AMC 中。这四家“坏账银行”旨在逐步重组并清算不良贷款，然后逐步退出。

繁荣！

相反，这些公司的规模和数量却在增长。到2018年，这四家公司的合并资产负债表总额达到约3万亿元（当时相当于7550亿美元），使其成为中国最大的金融机构之列。随着2010年代初期坏账的增加，监管机构还批准了一批“地方AMC”，通常仅限于一个省。到目前为止，已经创建了60多家此类地方实体。其中大多数由地方政府和其他国家投资者所有；少数几家，包括成立12年的国吼（Guohou），则由私人持有。

这些AMC并没有利用其资本从贷款机构的资产负债表中剥离坏账，

而是开始以与其他国企相同的低利率向银行借款，并以高得多的利率贷给陷入困境的公司。实际上，它们将自己变成了监管宽松的投资银行，经常迎合当时正处于繁荣期、但随后在中国房地产崩盘中倒闭的房地产开发商。

更令人不安的是，它们还通过帮助贷款机构向监管机构隐瞒坏账，创造了一项利润丰厚的副业。学术估计表明，此类活动如此普遍，以至于到2020年，它们可能掩盖了中国至少一半、甚至更多的不良贷款。那一年，规模最大且最激进的AMC华融（Huarong）爆雷，需要$6.6bn的国家救助。其董事长赖小民随后因一系列罪行被执行死刑。但这并未阻止AMC继续采取可疑的策略。

国吼重组的文件和内部分析显示，它模仿了其中许多做法。例如，除了收购不良资产外，它还开始提供高息贷款。它将其中许多贷款结构设计成看起来像股权投资，这样在监管机构审查债务风险集中度时，引发的警示较少。它还与银行签署了“抽屉协议”，即在不良贷款需要向监管机构报告之前将其购入，随后不久又将其卖回，从而赚取手续费。一项针对该公司的调查发现，该公司多年来一直处于经营亏损状态，无法偿还其130亿元的债务。

这些花招表明，中国银行的不良贷款规模可能远高于官方数据。在账面上，不良贷款从2022年的3.万亿元增加到今年第一季度的近3.7万亿元（见图表），尽管这在总资产中仍仅占1.5%的较低比例。随着中国持续震荡的房地产危机进一步压低房地产价值（许多企业借款人将其作为抵押品），更多的坏账以及糟糕的AMC可能会浮出水面。

大型央企AMC信达（Cinda）本月表示，预计今年上半年的净利润将下降高达70%。这可能反映了支撑其坏账组合的资产价值在崩溃。规模较小的地方AMC可能会跟随国吼的脚步陷入破产。中国东北工业地带的一家AMC在向一家足球俱乐部提供了一笔可疑贷款后，于2020年突然被解散。其他一些公司已被地方信用评级机构下调评级，处于崩溃边缘。

国吼之所以被重组而非清算，仅仅是因为投资者对其AMC牌照感兴趣。监管机构去年已停止发放此类牌照。这些投资者的身份尚未披露。无论他们是谁，其胆量一定足以媲美排爆专家。■

新加坡金融

股权份额

新加坡

这个城市国家想要一个像样的股票市场

新加坡的金融实力极其强大。作为富豪跨境资产的避风港，它仅次于香港和瑞士。它是全球第三大外汇交易场所，仅次于美国和英国；也是石油等实物大宗商品的重要交易地，同时还是贸易与海事金融中心以及特种保险枢纽。它所缺乏的是一个规模巨大的证券交易所。

多年来，较低的估值和较低的流动性导致从新加坡交易所（SGX）退市的公司多于上市的公司。像 Sea Group 这样估值 800亿美元、业务涵盖游戏到杂货的数字巨头等本土成功企业，通常选择纽约而非家乡上市。尽管人们一直将新加坡称为进入东南亚股票市场的门户，但 SGX 仅迎来了 70 家左右来自该地区的公司；而多达 40 家公司则更倾向于遥远的香港。在 2021 年至 2023 年间，由新加坡 30 家最大公司组成的基准海峡时报指数（被不恰当地简称为 STI）几乎没有波动。

然而，近期沉寂的 SGX 已有所动作。自 2024 年初以来，STI 上涨了约 75%，而 50% 为 ▶

新加坡波动

股票市场指数，2020年1月2日=100

img-98.jpeg

证券交易所，首次公开募股（IPO）筹集资金，10亿加元

-99.

来源：LSEG Workspace; S&P Capital IQ *截至 8 月 10 日

极具破坏力

中国，商业银行不良贷款，万亿元

-100.

来源：国家金融监督管理总局

金融与经济 69

► 香港的恒生指数（见前页图表）。Next 50 指数（其组成如其名所示）在过去一年左右上涨了三分之一，轻松击败了恒生指数。盈利在增长，尤其是新加坡那些令人印象深刻的银行，但股价与预测利润的比率也在上升，这表明投资者提高了对“新加坡公司”（Singapore Inc.）的估值。去年，公司通过首次公开募股（IPO）筹集了 20亿美元，虽然仅为香港筹集金额的一小部分，但却是 2019. 以来最高的一次。新加坡星展银行（DBS）的 Clifford Lee 表示，今年有望“大幅超过”去年，目前已筹集 11亿美元，说。

这次复苏在很大程度上归功于新加坡金融管理局（MAS）这一央行。即便韩国和日本等国家在改革股市时采取了如提高上市标准等“大棒”手段，新加坡则一直采取“胡萝卜”政策。进入 SGX 的企业可以获得公司税减免，以及与纽约科技股主场纳斯达克（Nasdaq）的共同上市“桥梁”。关于 IPO 前利润、信息披露等方面的上市要求已有所放宽。像针对表现不佳公司的“观察名单”这类告诫措施已被削减。经纪商为投资者提供决策依据的研究报告，每撰写一篇关于 SGX 股票的报告，即可获得最高 S$6,000 ($4,690) 的政府资助。根据 MAS 的数据，自 2025, 7 月以来，每月的研究报告数量增长了三倍多。

最核心的驱动力是股权市场发展计划（EQDP）， ►

BUTTONWOOD

博格尔之思

指数基金改变了市场。但请不要称其为被动投资

本月恰逢先锋第一指数投资信托（Vanguard First Index Investment Trust）成立 50 年，但其启动之初的情况并非十分理想。先锋公司的创始人杰克·博格尔（Jack Bogle）将其称为“彻头彻尾的失败”。他原希望筹集 5000万美元 到 1.5亿美元 之间，但最终仅获得略高于 1100万美元（相当于今天的 6500万美元）。作为首个面向个人投资者、旨在仅追踪股市指数——美国 S&P 500——的基金，它在当时引起了不小的反弹。同年晚些时候，《金融分析师杂志》（Financial Analysts Journal）的一篇文章轻蔑地写道：“一个通常带有强烈情绪的结论是，指数基金是一种‘逃避’，是一场很快就会消失的时尚。”

半个世纪后的今天，这种消失的迹象毫无可见。据行业组织投资公司协会（Investment Company Institute）估计，美国投资基金监管的净资产中，有超过 50% 处于追踪基金中。对于专注于国内股票的基金，这一比例为 64%。无论是通过个人储蓄、企业养老金计划还是大学捐赠基金，你可能至少持有其中之一的份额。

不出所料，那些被抢走饭碗的专业选股者依然愤怒不已。2016. 年，经纪商伯恩斯坦（Bernstein）雷霆般地抨击道，这比“马克思主义更糟糕”。上个月，英国零售储蓄者青睐的基金经理特里·史密斯（Terry Smith）在半年一度的投资者信函中，将自己长期的业绩不佳归咎于“一个由所谓被动或指数基金主导的市场”。在此坦白：本专栏作者曾持有史密斯先生旗下的一只基金，而这次发牢骚成了我卖出该基金并重新投资于全球股票追踪基金的信号。

然而，在某一方面，史密斯先生是对的。博格尔的创造位列 20 世纪最重要的金融创新之列，理应在大多数投资者的投资组合中占据一席之地。但认为指数基金是“被动”的观点纯属胡说。在过去的五十年里，这些工具重塑了市场——而且投资其中涉及大量选择。

最显而易见的决定是追踪哪个指数。假设你想接触欧洲股票。你应该通过 STOXX Europe 50 指数选择 50 家最大的公司，还是通过 MSCI Europe 选择 396 家？许多人通过追踪 NASDAQ 100, 这一专注于科技行业的赌注，忽略了金融和房地产等整个行业，从而“被动”投资美国股市。

即使你选择像富时全球全市场指数（FTSE Global All Cap）这样涵盖全球 10,000 家公司的指数，为什么就此停止？对于纯粹主义者来说，真正的被动意味着购买“市场组合”，即一个包含所有可投资资产（从私人信贷、房地产到艺术品和名贵葡萄酒）的、不切实际的组合。在股票追踪基金和债券追踪基金之间进行 60 / 40 分配是一个主动决定（为什么是 60 / 40？），而且是一个重大决定。

指数基金本身也不是被动的。先锋公司股票主管罗德尼·科梅吉斯（Rodney Comegys）解释说，基金经理拥有的裁量权比许多投资者意识到的要大。例如，在启动之初，第一指数基金规模太小，无法购买 S&P 500. 中的每一只股票。因此，它对其中约 300 只股票进行了“抽样”，这种做法至今仍被他人使用。经理们还可以通过交易来最小化应纳税收益，或者在每个人都知道他们必须进行调仓时（例如，当 SpaceX 这样的公司加入指数时）避免被坑。通过向空头出借股票以收取费用，还能获得一些额外收益。

最重要且令人担忧的是，指数基金似乎在日益影响资产价格。这不仅仅是因为它们的规模巨大。价格是由交易决定的，而交易频率较低的追踪基金（即使是规模巨大的那些）仅占这些交易的一小部分。但一系列研究表明，它们仍然造成了扭曲。一项传播尤为广泛的研究概述了“非弹性市场假设”。该研究发现证据表明，固定配置基金（例如将所有资产投资于股票的追踪基金）的存在，确保了流入股市的每 $1 资金会将整体市场价值推高 $3-8。其他人则认为，流入指数基金的资金不成比例地推高了最大规模公司的股价。

那么，指数基金的流行或许正在积聚麻烦，在帮助吹大股市泡沫的同时，也巩固了少数企业巨头的主导地位。讽刺的是，即便如此，这也不是撤资的理由。当股价下次暴跌时，就像它们飙升时一样，追踪基金将获得平均收益——表现将优于平均水平的股票挑选者，因为后者将获得相同的回报，但还需扣除更昂贵的费用。在 50 年后，可以打赌指数基金将变得更加强大。

70 金融与经济

► 一笔 S65亿美元 的现金资金正提供给那些能够将新加坡股市的一新加坡元政府资金与一新加坡元或更多外部资本相匹配的资产管理公司。到目前为止，股权驱动计划（EQDP）已向九家投资公司发放了 S40亿美元。更大的需求可能会导致估值过高，进而使新加坡成为一个更具吸引力的上市地。新加坡金融管理局（MAS）的 Leong Sing Chiong 表示，这个想法是创造“一个飞轮”，而“不是为了扭曲市场”。

为了获得 EQDP 的资金，投资公司正在推出专注于新加坡的基金。根据当地传说，菠萝在搬入新家时是好兆头，因此美国银行摩根大通（JPMorgan Chase）的一只新基金在营销材料中大量使用了菠萝元素，并承诺投资者将“在收入机会中滚动”（rolling in income opportunities）。富通基金管理公司（Fullerton Fund Management）是一家由新加坡主权财富基金淡马锡（Temasek）控制的公司，该公司自 10 月推出面向零售投资者的新 EQDP 基金以来，其资产已从约 3000万美元 激增至 S10亿美元。

自 EQDP 于 2025 年启动以来，海峡时报指数（STI）的日均交易量增长了超过一半。更多公司正在寻求 IPO；据认为约有 50 家公司在排队。今年晚些时候，由私募市场巨头黑石（Blackstone）支持的数据中心运营商 AirTrunk 希望通过在新加坡上市一个房地产投资信托基金（REIT）来筹集 15亿美元。另一家当地银行华侨银行（OCBC）的 Carmen Lee 表示：“这必须是我职业生涯中见过的最好的项目储备之一。”

天佑之果

政府尚未止步。今年2月，政府宣布在2028年，新加坡规模达5000亿加元的强制性养老金计划——中央公积金（CPF）将推出自愿性的“生命周期”产品，该产品会随着时间的推移自动将投资组合从股票重新平衡为债券。目前，大多数CPF储蓄都存放于政府债券中。如果生命周期产品能像澳大利亚庞大的养老金基金那样，引导资金流向本地股票，这将改变市场格局。澳大利亚麦格理银行（Macquarie）的杰登·万塔拉-基斯（Jayden Vantara-kis）估计，流入新加坡股票的资金每年可能达到60亿新加坡元，相当于每年一个EQDP的规模。

并非所有事情都朝着新加坡希望的方向发展。去年规模最大的上市项目——由日本电信巨头NTT支持的数据中心房地产投资信托基金（REIT）遭遇了失败。其股价目前低于发行价7%。今年九个上市项目中，仅有两个的交易价格高于首发价。今年晚些时候，总部位于新加坡、大部分产能位于邻国马来西亚的数据中心运营商DayOne，计划在美国上市筹集50亿加元。

一位资深银行家表示，新加坡在IPO方面的承诺与表现之间存在持久的差距，这损害了信心。这个城市国家的精明官僚们不能仅靠资金来解决这个问题。但这是一个开始。■

美联储

同一美联储，不同的一天

凯文·沃什正努力摆脱前任留下的难题

凯文·沃什（KEVIN WARSH）很喜欢标榜一个“新篇章”。这位不久前刚上任的美联储主席自5月就职以来，在几乎每一次公开露面时都会引用这个文学比喻。他希望市场、政治家和家庭意识到，现在美联储的情况将有所不同。然而，他任职的前几个月，突出之处并非新意，而是延续性。

回溯到一年前，即2025年夏天。当时，杰罗姆·鲍威尔（Jerome Powell）领导的美联储尴尬地陷入了不稳定的就业数据与由关税推高的高于目标的通胀之间——这是一个典型但棘手的央行困境。对此，唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）又增加了一种更不寻常的政治束缚。总统试图以涉嫌抵押贷款文件违规为由撤换美联储理事丽莎·库克（Lisa Cook），这威胁到了美联储的独立性。如果这可能导致被解雇，美国的央行官员在面对白宫要求降低利率的指令时，可能会三思而后行。

一年后，同样的故事几乎原封不动地在重复。通胀仍未回到美联储2%的目标。8月12日公布的7月消费者价格指数显示，同比上涨3.4%。剔除食品和能源的月度“核心商品”价格也有所回升，这表明公司正再次将关税转嫁给消费者。包括服务业在内的整体核心通胀率为2.5%，稍微令人安心一些。尽管如此，高于目标的通胀已经促使几位利率制定者表示异议，支持提高利率。市场目前将美联储9月中旬下次会议加息的概率定在约40%。

与此同时，就业数据指向了相反的风险：经济走软，需要降低利率。美国在7月减少了23,000个就业岗位，且前几个月的增长被大幅下调。尽管沃什先生长期以来以加息鹰派著称，但他可能会发现后者的结果更为舒适。特朗普先生在每个机会场合都喋喋不休地表示他希望降息。

然后是库克女士。6月，最高法院阻止了特朗普先生解雇她的尝试，并为美联储“独特”的宪法地位制定了特殊保护措施。总统对此并不在意，反而变本加厉。8月5日，白宫致信库克女士，重申特朗普先生正考虑解雇她，并给她三周时间做出回应。库克女士的律师在声明中称这些指控“毫无根据”，且最高法院的先例“十分明确”。沃什先生可能还得等待那个新篇章的到来。

img-102.jpeg

库克搅了凯文的汤

金融与经济 71

干预日元

全球最大的套利交易者开始平仓

img-103.jpeg

美国财政部长斯科特·贝森特（Scott Bessent）习惯于对央行进行大胆的对赌。他曾就职于索罗斯基金管理公司（Soros Fund Management），这家对冲基金因在1992.年英镑危机期间“击溃”英格兰银行而闻名。但在7月下旬，贝森特先生选择了相反的赌注，与一家央行站在一起捍卫其货币。他动用了美国的外汇储备，协助日本银行（BOJ）买入日元，此前日元兑加元汇率已跌至1986年以来的最低点，突破了¥163。

贝森特先生并不掩饰他最新的这笔交易。在一次部分向媒体开放的内阁会议上，他将一份待办事项清单留在戴维营会议桌上，上面写着：“买入日元”。他的上司也为这次干预感到自豪。“我们在财务上……非常、非常强劲，”唐纳德·特朗普总统自豪地解释道，“他们想要一点帮助。”

日本无疑对此心存感激。但如果将其视为一个无助的纯真之辈就错了。相反，通过与日本政府联手，美国实际上是与史上最大的货币交易者之一合力——这个机构习惯于进行规模之大足以让任何对冲基金颤抖的押注。

据新闻机构路透社报道，日本银行在代表日本财务省进行的最新干预中，可能花费了超过950亿美元。它以每加元约¥160的价格出售加元。其储备的大部分是在加元兑换价格低于¥100.时积累的。因此，在进行这笔交易时，日本政府获得了巨额利润。粗略计算表明，其获利可能高达¥5.7trn (360亿美元)。据报道，乔治·索罗斯通过做空英镑赚了约10亿美元 (worth some 24亿美元 in today's money)。

政府的跨境持有资产对其财政大有裨益。圣路易斯联邦储备银行的 YILI Chien、宾夕法尼亚大学的 Harold Cole 和斯坦福大学的 Hanno Lustig 在一篇名为《日本如何？》（What About Japan?）的论文中计算得出，日本政府、日本银行和日本公共养老基金共同持有的海外资产价值超过 GDP. 的 56%。在截至 2023 年的 25 年间，这些资产的年平均回报率为 5.8%（其中只有一小部分通过交易实现了获利）。

那么账本的另一边情况如何？公共部门的负债主要以收益率相对较低的日元计价。政府以本国货币发行债券，其中许多被央行买入。央行则欠商业银行日元，因为这些银行在央行开有账户。因此，公共部门的资产负债表既受益于有利的汇率变动，也受益于其持有的海外资产与欠下的日元负债之间的收益率差，即所谓的“套利”（carry）。正如 Chien 先生、Lustig 先生和哈佛大学的 Wenxin Du 在另一篇文章中所述：“日本公共部门持仓的巨大规模使其成为全球最大的套利交易投资者”。

日本银行虽然是一个“偶然”的套利交易者，但其成功程度毫不逊色。在过去 25 年里，其货币干预的目的并非为了赚钱，而是旨在稳定日元并纠正汇率最严重的失衡。在 20 世纪 90 年代资产价格泡沫破裂后，日元过强损害了日本的出口商，并加剧了其通货紧缩倾向。相比之下，日元过弱则会提高食品和燃料的成本，而其中大部分依赖进口。

只要日本还在与需求停滞和通缩压力作斗争，其巨大的套利交易就是可持续的。在那种情况下，央行将始终保持低利率和日元弱势。但目前的潜在通胀已经上升，且接近日本央行 2% 的年度目标。其利率设定委员会的几位成员担心通胀将超出预期。预测人士预计，该委员会将在 2027 年 7 月前三次提高利率。对于这个全球最大的套利交易者来说，这是一个尴尬的前景。根据卢斯蒂格先生的数据，这将迅速使日本公共部门的综合借贷成本增加 GDP 的 0.75%，而随着长期债务的展期，成本还将进一步增加。

保持冷静，逐步退出

这些危险让日本的干预行动呈现出新的意义。在利率上涨迫在眉睫而日元依然极其廉价的情况下，政府选择了一个恰当的时机来削减其日元负债。通过抛售美元并买入日元，它实际上是在回购自己发行的一部分欠条。由于日元尚未出现决定性的反弹，日本央行每抛售一美元，就能抵消大量的日元负债。随着每一次这样的汇率防御，全球规模最大的套利交易规模便会缩小一点。

其运作机制较为复杂。日本央行向商业银行抛售的任何美元都会耗尽这些银行在央行的日元账户，从而减少公共部门欠它们的金额。但这并非故事的全部，因为日本央行的干预通常是“冲销”的：央行从银行购买政府证券（通常是财政部发行的短期债券），从而恢复其日元余额。但最终结果仍然是，国库以及日本的综合公共部门需要担心的日元负债减少了。

这种微妙的削减并不能消除危险。如果上个月的买入额确实达到了 $95，那么它们抵消的公共部门计息负债还不足 1%。但尽管如此，这次干预仍是朝着正确方向迈出的及时一步。而且，从货币市场对日元缺乏信心来看，无论是否有美国朋友的帮助，日本央行未来可能还有多次重复此项交易的机会。“买入日元”在相当长的一段时间内可能仍会留在日本政府的待办事项清单上。■

72

科学与技术

img-104.jpeg

神经药理学

保持清醒

大脑可能即将迎来它的“Ozempic时刻”

一种肽类物质最近改变了医学。基于胰高血糖素样肽-1（GLP-1）的药物（一种在餐后由肠道释放的激素）最初用于治疗糖尿病，随后被证明在帮助人们减轻体重方面效果显著。此后，它们在心脏病、肾脏病、睡眠呼吸暂停和其他疾病领域也展现出了疗效。制药商现在押注另外两种肽——食欲素（orexins），认为它们在治疗多种大脑相关疾病方面可能会走类似的道路。

食欲素是一对神经递质，即在神经元之间传递信息的化学物质。这类特定神经递质的主要职责之一是调节觉醒状态。而新一代旨在模拟其效果的药物正接近市场。

8月5日，美国药品监管机构批准了由日本制药公司武田（Takeda）研发的 overorexton，使其成为首个用于治疗发作性睡病（narcolepsy）的食欲素激动剂（即刺激相同细胞表面受体的分子）。发作性睡病会导致患者在白天过度嗜睡，并容易在毫无预警的情况下打盹。爱尔兰生物技术公司 Alkermes 正在开发一款竞争产品。礼来（Eli Lilly）的命运已被 GLP-1 改变，它不打算错过另一次肽类药物的热潮。今年6月，礼来收购了处于早期临床试验阶段的食欲素药物研发公司 Centessa，交易金额根据试验结果最高可达 78 亿加元。摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）银行估计，仅发作性睡病及相关睡眠障碍，食欲素药物到 2035 年每年可产生 160 亿加元的收入。相比之下，目前的发作性睡病药物年销售额约为 30 亿加元。

而且，人们的兴奋点不仅在于发作性睡病（据估计，美国每 2,000 人中就有 1 人患此病）。食欲素有助于协调睡眠、注意力、动力以及大脑的奖励系统。制药商希望食欲素药物最终能治疗抑郁症、注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）和成瘾症，这些病症困扰着数以亿计的人。

食欲素是在近三十年前由两个独立工作的团队发现的。1998年1月，路易斯·德·莱塞亚（Luis de Lecea）及其在加利福尼亚州拉霍亚的斯克里普斯研究所（Scripps Research Institute）的同事发现了这些肽，并将其命名为“下丘脑分泌素”（hypocretins）。几周后，由达拉斯的德克萨斯大学西南医学中心柳泽正志（Yanagisawa Masashi）领导的小组报告称，将相同的肽注入大鼠大脑会使动物进食增加。他们将这些分子命名为“食欲素”（orexins），源自希腊语 orexis，意为食欲。

食欲素的真实作用在次年显现。斯坦福大学的埃马纽埃尔·米尼奥（Emmanuel Mignot）当时正在研究杜宾犬和拉布拉多检索犬的遗传性发作性睡病，这两个犬种容易在玩耍中突然晕倒。他证明，一种突变阻断了大脑对食欲素的反应能力。同年，柳泽博士的实验室发现，被基因工程改造为

→ 本节其他内容

73 科学是否仍具颠覆性？

74 美国国家航空航天局（NASA）与火灾风暴

75 信息通达：微生物组黑客

科学与技术 73

▶ 缺乏食欲素的小鼠会反复陷入睡眠并晕倒。随后在人类身上得到了证实：发作性睡病患者失去了产生食欲素的特化神经元。

这些神经元位于下丘脑，这是大脑中隐藏在眼睛后方的一个区域。食欲素一旦释放，会根据其性质锁定在相邻神经元的两种细胞表面受体之一（OX1R 或 OX2R）上，从而激活它们。OX2R 对于维持觉醒状态至关重要。它的激活会刺激几个依赖于其他神经递质（如去甲肾上腺素、血清素、多巴胺等）的促觉醒系统，并使它们协同工作，就像管弦乐团的指挥一样。而 OX1R 则更多地与奖励和动力相关。

您感到困倦了……

制药商首先学会了如何关闭 OX2R 这位“指挥家”。自 2014 年起，食欲素拮抗剂（它们通过阻断分子的作用而非模拟其作用，从而促进睡眠）已被用于治疗失眠。它们与传统的安眠药作用机制不同，后者是通过增强 GABA（大脑主要的抑制性神经递质之一）来起效的。

哥本哈根大学的食欲素专家比尔吉特·科努姆（Birgitte Kornum）表示，此类药物诱导的是镇静而非自然睡眠，且在持续使用后往往会失去疗效。相比之下，食欲素拮抗剂则是降低大脑的觉醒信号，让其促眠系统接管。

更大的突破可能不在于阻断食欲素的信号，而在于恢复它——因为许多睡眠障碍源于食欲素信号传导故障。人们目前考虑的直接应用场景是 1 型发作性睡病（NT1），其特点是白天过度嗜睡，并伴有猝倒症（cataplexy），即通常由强烈情绪触发的肌肉控制突然丧失。接下来的目标则是 2 型发作性睡病（NT2，无猝倒症）以及特发性嗜睡症（一种相关的白天过度嗜睡类型），这些也都进入了制药商的研发视野。

NT1 是由与 OX2R 结合的食欲素水平异常低下引起的。在 REM（快速眼动）睡眠阶段（此时梦境最强烈），大脑会使身体瘫痪，以防止人体实际做出梦中的动作。当人清醒时，这种瘫痪状态被去甲肾上腺素和血清素（两种由食欲素维持的神经递质）所抑制。如果食欲素不足，即使人在完全清醒的状态下，瘫痪电路也可能被触发。他们可能正处于完全清醒状态，例如在 burst of laughter（大笑）之中，然后突然失去肌肉控制，瘫倒在地。

然而，重新开启食欲素比关闭它要困难得多。拮抗剂只需要嵌入受体以防止食欲素结合即可。而激动剂必须能够实际复制一种体积比药物本身大许多倍的多肽的效果。它还必须穿过血脑屏障，因为该屏障会将潜在有害的分子挡在器官之外。

武田药品（Takeda）的首次尝试是一种名为 firazorexton 的激动剂，早期表现出潜力，但在 2021 年因导致数名患者肝损伤而停止研发。不过，2025 年 5 月公布的关于 overorexton（其后续 OX2R 激动剂）的结果引起了轰动。在一项涉及 90 名患者的为期八周的试验中，志愿者坐在黑暗的房间里，测试他们能保持清醒多久——这一程序被称为“觉醒维持测试”（Maintenance of Wakefulness test）。在没有使用 overorexton 的情况下，许多人在一分钟左右就睡着了。而在使用该药后，根据剂量的不同，他们能多保持清醒 12.5 到 25 分钟，使许多人回到了正常范围。与服用安慰剂的参与者相比，服用该药的人发生猝倒症发作的频率大约降低了三分之二。副作用包括失眠，以及约三分之一的患者出现不适的尿意。

overorexton 的不同之处不仅在于其效果，还在于实现效果的方式。现有的治疗方法，包括哌甲明（methylphenidate）等兴奋剂和莫达非尼（modafinil）等促觉醒药物，是对症治疗而非针对疾病本身。它们增加大脑许多部位多巴胺和去甲肾上腺素等神经递质的活性。这虽然能提高警觉性，但还可能导致焦虑、血压升高和睡眠质量差。某些药物还带有成瘾风险。

食欲素的作用位置更上游。它们不是刺激警觉系统的单个部分，而是帮助它们协同工作。柳泽教授（Dr Yanagisawa）表示，与兴奋剂相比，食欲素激动剂应该能产生更自然、更稳定的觉醒状态，副作用更少，且滥用潜力更低。

至于 NT2 和特发性过度睡眠症，礼来公司（Lilly）通过 Centessa 公司获得的食欲素激动剂正在针对这两类疾病以及 NT1 进行测试。初步数据令人鼓舞，尽管样本量较小。在一项涉及 55 名患者的试验中，该药物使 NT1 患者的清醒时间延长了 20 分钟以上，使 NT2 患者的清醒时间延长了 10 分钟以上。

宏大愿景

制药公司正在研究食欲素激动剂对更普遍疾病的影响。Alkermes 正在测试一种用于成人 ADHD（注意缺陷多动障碍）治疗的药物（尽管目前的药物被认为相当有效），这是基于一项观察，即发作性睡病患者在治疗中获得的一项额外益处是注意力提高，这表明该药可能对 ADHD 同样有效。其他公司则在探索将其用于治疗睡眠呼吸暂停，这是一种更为常见的疾病。

此外，还有一些关于另一个受体 OX1R 在奖赏与动力作用方面的诱人想法——尽管相关科学研究尚不成熟。柳川教授（Dr Yanagisawa）表示，阻断 OX1R 在抑制成瘾渴望方面显示出前景。激活该受体而非阻断它是一种更具推测性的方法，但他认为，增强进入大脑奖赏回路的食欲素信号可能有助于治疗某些类型的抑郁症，甚至增强动力。

这些只是线索而非证据，在任何药物上市之前都需要经过严格的测试。礼来公司（Lilly）首席科学官丹·斯科夫隆斯基（Dan Skovronsky）认为，饥饿和睡眠都是“主稳态机制”——即保持身体平衡的系统。当这些机制失调时，疾病随之而来。基于 GLP-1 的药物的广泛用途已经证明了针对整个调节系统可以取得怎样的成就。制药公司希望食欲素疗法能取得类似的成功。■

科学之科学

磨坊之困

研究显示科学进步放缓，但该结论可能存在缺陷

科学最好的时代已经过去，其进步速度正在放缓，这是一个古老的观点。而且，既然科学本身就是一个非常适合科学家研究的课题，许多人对此进行了探讨。

其中一项显著的贡献出现在 2023, 年，当时明尼苏达大学的博士生迈克尔·帕克（Michael Park）及其同事在《自然》（Nature）杂志上发表了一篇论文。该论文分析了 45m 篇科学论文和 3.9m 项专利的引用模式，并得出结论，两者的“颠覆性”自 20 世纪 50 年代以来已大幅下降。这一结果得到了广泛报道（包括在《经济学人》上）。其研究结果进入了国会— ▶

一次颠覆性的重新分析

整合-颠覆指数，科学论文*

img-105.jpeg

*约 4500万 篇论文 来源：V. Holst, V. Ginis 等人，《数据集伪影是科学颠覆性下降的隐藏驱动因素》，《自然》（Nature），2026年

74 科学与技术

▶ 议会听证会以及白宫官员的演讲。

8月12日出现了一个转折。《自然》发表了一篇后续论文，认为朴博士及其同事的结论在很大程度上是幻象，是由他们分析的数据集问题引起的。布鲁塞尔自由大学的博士生文森特·霍尔斯特（Vincent Holst）及其合著者认为，如果修正这些问题，大部分颠覆性的下降现象就会消失（见图表）。

原论文的主张取决于一个被称为“整合-颠覆指数”（consolidation-disruption index，简称 CD 指数）的指标，该指标旨在衡量一篇给定的论文或一项专利在多大程度上撼动了其所在领域。它将一篇论文的参考文献与随后发表的论文的参考文献进行比较。如果随后的论文既引用了该论文本身，又引用了该论文所参考的早期研究，那么该论文（或专利）被归类为“整合性”的。如果未来的论文引用了该论文本身，但忽略了其自身的参考文献，则被视为“颠覆性”的——其假设是，这样一篇论文已经彻底改变了局面，以至于旧的工作变得无关紧要。CD 指数的范围从 -1（最大程度的整合）到 1（最大程度的颠覆）。

霍尔斯特先生认为，朴博士最初的分析中包含了约 970,000 篇论文和 142,000 项专利，其 CD 值为 1。其中大多数获得如此高分的原因是它们完全没有参考文献，且本身被至少一篇随后的出版物引用。但当他和同事随机抽取一百篇此类论文和专利时，他们发现 93% 的论文和 98% 的专利确实包含参考文献——它们只是被包含它们的数据库误分类了。进一步调查表明，被误分类的论文和专利比例随时间而下降。剔除早期那些错误地看起来具有变革性的工作后，大部分所谓的颠覆性下降就消失了。

朴博士及其同事并不认同。在与霍尔斯特先生的批评文章一同发表的一篇反驳文章中，他们指出，即使按照霍尔斯特先生及其合著者的建议操作，他们仍然能看到颠覆性的显著下降。

部分争论集中在数据源上。朴博士最初分析的核心是一个名为 Web of Science 的数据库。但 Web of Science 并非公开可用。霍尔斯特先生及其同事部分依赖于一个名为 SciSciNet 的免费替代方案。朴博士声称，SciSciNet 中声称没有引用的作品比 Web of Science 多得多。霍尔斯特先生反驳说，尽管 Web of Science 是封闭的，但他们仍然设法重建了朴博士对其的使用情况，且他们的批评依然成立。但在一封电子邮件中，朴博士的合著者之一罗素·方克（Russell Funk）声称，这种重建操作是不正确的。

这一切意味着什么？霍尔斯特先生的论文并不是对朴博士结果的唯一批评。去年，加州大学默塞德分校的亚历山大·迈克尔·彼得森（Alexander Michael Petersen）及其同事发表了一篇论文，认为“引用通胀”——部分原因是简单的客观事实，即发表的作品越多，可供引用的作品就越多——意味着人们应该预期平均论文的 CD 分数随时间下降。当他们重新分析数据时，他们声称在 2005 年至 2015 年之间，颠覆性甚至可能有所增加。

但反过来，朴博士的论文也不是暗示进步确实在放缓的唯一证据：2020 年，斯坦福大学的经济学家尼古拉斯·布鲁姆（Nicholas Bloom）及其同事分析了生产力数据，并得出结论，许多行业的技术进步在年复一年地变得越来越难以获得。科学之源正在枯竭的观点无疑是颠覆性的。至于这是否属实，目前仍无定论。■

火风暴

烈焰之战

山火滋养的天气反噬其创造者

大多数飞机都会尽量避开恶劣天气。但 7 月 29 日在科罗拉多州落基山大都会机场（Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport）滑入跑道的一架湾流 V 型机（Gulfstream V）并非如此。它的飞行路径被设定为直接进入俄勒冈州一次罕见且鲜为人知的天气事件——火积雨云（pyrocumulonimbus，简称 pyroCbs）。这种高耸的、带有烟雾色的风暴云形成于山火之上，并产生能够成倍增加引发火灾之火破坏力的天气。

这架湾流飞机的旅程是“注入烟雾与火积雨云实验”（INjected Smoke and PYrocumulonimbus Experiment，简称 INSPYRE）的首次飞行——这是美国航空航天局（NASA）与美国海军研究实验室（NRL）的一项联合任务。该项目由 NRL 的大卫·彼得森（David Peterson）领导，旨在通过采集样本并从内部监测风暴的演变，以前所未有的细节测量火积雨云。团队希望由此获得的数据能帮助确定此类风暴在地球气候变暖中所扮演的角色，并让消防员在应对规模和强度日益增加的山火时拥有更好的装备。2026 年的夏天给美国和欧洲带来了迄今为止最严重的一些火灾。7 月，法国记录到了其历史上首次出现的火积雨云。

雷暴发生在温暖潮湿的空气被迅速向上驱动时。空气在上升过程中冷却，其水蒸气凝结形成云。在适当的条件下，这些云会生长成高耸的积雨云，其翻滚的内部会产生强风、闪电和冰雹。

对于火积雨云而言，火驱动了这一过程，并对其进行了增强。剧烈的高温导致空气激增上升，同时携带燃烧植被释放的水分。烟雾也被一同带入。它堵塞了火上方形成的云层，限制了降雨，同时增加了闪电的可能性。缺乏降雨意味着很少有水能到达地面，从而导致火势蔓延。

NRL 的迈克尔·弗罗姆（Michael Fromm）表示，火积雨云表明山火已经“失控”。而且，风暴只会放大火灾的破坏力。不稳定的环境使得控制山火变得更加困难，并给消防员和平民带来额外威胁。火积雨云在释放闪电并在凶猛且不可预测的风中卷起阵阵余烬时，还可能引发新的火灾。

img-106.jpeg

无烟不成火

科学与技术 75

火灾产生风暴的破坏性影响并不局限于地面。它们的高度和强烈的上升气流意味着它们像烟囱一样，将烟雾直接送入平流层。在那里，烟羽比在低海拔地区更容易扩散（见图）且停留时间更长。烟雾颗粒通过吸收阳光改变地球的辐射平衡，并改变平流层的气流。这些颗粒表面的化学反应还会破坏大气中的臭氧，而臭氧提供了抵御太阳紫外线的屏蔽作用，这可能会受到影响。2019 年底，在澳大利亚东南部为期四天的山火爆发期间，火积雨云向低层平流层注入了约 100 万吨烟雾——这一数量相当于一次中等规模的火山喷发。

弗罗姆博士说，关于火积雨云，“尽管我们已经知道很多，但仍然知之甚少”。INSPYRE 旨在通过解决三个重大未知问题来改变这一现状。第一个问题是哪些火灾会形成火积雨云以及原因何在。第二个问题是决定风暴是否会将烟雾注入平流层以及注入多少的因素是什么。第三个问题是烟雾如何改变平流层的成分，进而影响地球的辐射平衡。

为了完成这一切，彼得森博士组建了一支由大约 150 名研究人员组成的团队，旨在从各个角度追踪火积雨云（pyroCbs）。在地面上，配备了激光雷达、雷达和气象气球的卡车探测风暴的底部。在空中，湾流飞机直接飞入火积雨云翻滚的云层中以采集样本，与之配合的还有第二架由美国国家航空航天局（NASA）专门建造的名为 ER-2 的飞机，它在风暴云之上、平流层约 10 公里处巡航，从而能够监测烟柱。

7 月 29 日的这次出航成功地将所有这些环节结合在一起。“效果出奇地好，”彼得森博士说道。他对此深有体会，因为他当时就在湾流飞机上。他说，由于烟雾的存在，飞机一旦进入云层，周围就陷入了一片黑暗。随后在 8 月 3 日，该团队在犹他州的一次 2, 第二次火积雨云事件中，采集到了首个被注入大气层的烟柱样本。他们将继续保持每周大约三次的飞行频率，直到 9 月。

这次任务的时机恰到好处。野火发生的频率和强度正在增加。尽管 INSPYRE 的重点在美国，但欧洲自己的大规模野火科学任务 EUBURN 已于 2025 年启动。如果更精准的测量能让地面人员更准确地预测随野火而来的极端天气，那么即便是在火积雨云的阴霾中，此类任务也将能带来一线希望。■

见闻

你能“黑进”自己的微生物组吗？

可以。但或许最好不要过度思考这件事

人体肠道中的数万亿个微生物将复杂的碳水化合物消化成脂肪酸，为个体提供约 10% 的热量。它们合成维生素，特别是维生素 K（调节血液凝固）和各种 B 族维生素。它们帮助调节免疫系统，抑制病原体的生长，并调节信号分子的产生（例如血清素），这些分子参与将信息从肠道传递到大脑。

因此，让肠道微生物组保持最佳状态是明智的。人们普遍认为，维持其中细菌的多样性是实现这一目标的良好方法。而且，由于不同物种的食欲不同，饮食多样化是有意义的。

2018 年，一项美国公民科学项目表明，每周食用 30 种植物的人，其微生物组的多样性显著高于食用少于 10 种植物的人。而斯坦福大学在 2021 年发表的研究证实，泡菜和酸菜等发酵食品也能使微生物组多样化。不过，有些人认为这种通用建议是不够的，他们更倾向于定制化的方案。

只要支付一笔可观的费用，他们就能获得这种服务。所谓的直接面向消费者（D2℃）公司会分析粪便样本，并根据发现的 DNA 和 RNA 汇总其中微生物的清单。

这些公司还可能提供量身定制的饮食建议、活菌剂量以及特殊的微生物友好型补充剂，旨在填补其测试中标记出的任何微生物空白。

这种方法的问题在于，不存在一个可以作为参考的“正确”微生物组。事实上，不同的微生物组之间可能存在相当大的差异，但仍然能有效地为宿主带来理想的结果。肠道健康状况不佳的最大警示信号是简单的生物多样性缺乏——而多样化且包含部分发酵食品的饮食恰恰擅长纠正这一点。相比之下，认为通过微调某种细菌的存在或缺失就能明显改善健康的观点，缺乏已发表的科学依据，且许多 D2℃ 公司不愿分享其主张所依据的专利数据的细节。

但也有例外。在英国，蒂姆·斯佩克特（Tim Spector）同时兼顾学术科学（伦敦国王学院的职位）和商业（他参与创办了一家名为 Zoe 的 D2℃ 公司），且至今表现稳健。在获得用户许可的情况下，Zoe 客户的结果被用于体面的、经过同行评审的研究。到目前为止，这表明个体定制饮食并没有巨大的效果，但可能在边际上有所帮助。

然而，即便定制化方法确实有价值，它也必然取决于 D2℃ 公司进行的微生物普查是否准确。为了测试这一点，美国国家标准与技术研究院的研究人员准备了 21 组均质化（因此完全相同）的粪便，并向 7 家 D2℃ 公司每家发送了三组。当（于 2 月发表的）结果返回时，不仅不同公司的分析结果之间存在显著差异，而且在某个案例中，同一家公司的分析结果之间也存在差异。

正如加州大学戴维斯分校的进化微生物学家乔纳森·艾森（Jonathan Eisen）所观察到的，仅仅因为微生物组存在差异，并不意味着个性化微生物组医学时代很快就会到来。事实上，他的措辞更为激烈，称：“（该领域）的大多数主张都是伪造的。”或许更好的做法是省下钱，去买一罐泡菜。■

76

文化

旅游

新的旅行顾问

有些人担心聊天机器人会让所有人都前往相同的地方。 事实上，它们可能会产生相反的效果。

当正午的阳光在罗马倾泻而下，游客们欣慰地意识到该吃比萨了。但该选哪一家？畅销指南系列《孤独星球》（Lonely Planet）推荐 Antico Forno Roscioli 的“美味”切片。Tripadvisor 的首选是特雷维喷泉附近的 Da Cicero，拥有超过 2,000 条五星好评。TikTok 上的热门地点则包括 Piccolo Buco，那里排着长长的饥饿的 Z 世代队列，极具辨识度。

旅行者寻找灵感和规划行程的方式在几个世纪中不断演变。早期的维多利亚时代旅行者由像托马斯·库克（Thomas Cook）这样的旅行社引导游历异国他乡，库克为英国游客提供保护，使其免受欧洲大陆铁路搬运工的惊吓（库克将他们描述为“散发着烟草或洋葱味、穿着蓝色长袍的仆役”）。一些游客仍然倾向于有人引导（见下一篇报道）。但许多人选择独立出行。像法国的《Routard》这样的指南会引导旅行者前往最佳地点。在《孤独星球》中被提及，依然足以让曼谷的一家青年旅舍或加德满都的一家咖喱店客满。

互联网三次改变了这一切。首先，像 Tripadvisor 这样的评论平台利用群体智慧，对从英国酒吧到埃及金字塔的一切进行评分（一条一星评论抱怨道：“沙子太多”）。它们拥有巨大的影响力。哥伦比亚大学商学院的丹特·多纳蒂（Dante Donati）发现，当欧盟在 2017 年取消移动漫游费用时，随之而来的在旅途中咨询 Tripadvisor 的游客增加，导致罗马面向游客的餐厅收入增长了 5%，且主要使评分最高的餐厅受益。

旅行建议的第二次数字化变革来自社交网络。其影响更为混乱且难以预测，因为应用程序的算法会出乎意料地选中某个景点，并将其推送到数百万用户的动态中。像哈尔施塔特（Hallstatt）这样如画的奥地利湖边小镇等出片地点已被挤爆。“TravelTok”热潮导致人群在毫无准备的餐馆前排队数小时。

现在，人们正转向聊天机器人。根据咨询公司麦肯锡（McKinsey）的数据，去年夏天 55% 的美国人使用像 ChatGPT 这样的 AI 应用来规划假期，高于前一年的 38%。这个数字可能会再次上升。旧的建议来源已经过时。指南书的销量在过去二十年里大幅下降。Tripadvisor 将其网站流量的流失归咎于 AI，据估计，其流量在过去一年中下降了五分之一。

许多人担心 AI 可能会使旅游业更加集中。驱动聊天机器人的大语言模型是预测机器，旨在给出最可能的答案。如果你提出一个开放式的旅行建议请求，你将被引导至一个所有人都在去的地方。威斯敏斯特大学的研究

→ 本节其他内容

77 旅行社需求旺盛

78 一部关于卢旺达的热门小说

78 为世界布线

79 年轻的电影观众

80 背景故事：“汪汪队”之战

文化 77

▶ 发现 ChatGPT 表现出“对成熟旅游中心的明显偏好”，推荐的“隐藏瑰宝”包括埃菲尔铁塔和罗马斗兽场。

这可能会缩小旅行者的视野。莱里达大学的丹尼尔·保罗·伊·阿古斯蒂（Daniel Paül i Agustí）研究了 ChatGPT 的旅行建议与人们在 Instagram 上可能看到的地点有何对比（见地图）。他从 ChatGPT 那里收集了 10,000 条关于巴塞罗那访问地点的建议。随后，他采集了游客在 Instagram 上发布的同等数量的城市照片，并对其位置进行了编码。Instagram 的图像来自约 1,300 个不同的地点，而 ChatGPT 推荐的选择则更窄，仅为 215 个地点，主要集中在像圣家堂这样的热门景点。（它还建议了 38 个似乎是虚构的景点。）保罗·伊·阿古斯蒂先生警告说，AI 对知名景点的关注可能会“导致游客过度拥挤”。

然而，AI 最终可能会产生相反的效果，将游客分散到比以往更广泛的地点。首先，由于不同模型的训练数据来源不同，它们给出的建议可能截然不同。我们请 AI 分析公司 Evertune 通过询问聊天机器人来帮助解决罗马披萨的选择难题。ChatGPT 的答案主要基于在线指南和 Reddit 讨论帖，它倾向于推荐梵蒂冈附近的 Pizzarium Bonci 以及获得过多项奖项的 Seu Pizza。而谷歌的 AI 模式则利用 Google Maps 的评论，建议选择万神殿附近的一家按片售卖的披萨店 Pizza Florida。

聊天机器人不仅彼此之间存在分歧，而且它们自身也并不一致。其概率性的特质意味着对于相同的查询，它们会给出不同的答案。Evertune 发现，Gemini 最常推荐的两家披萨店 Remo 和 Pizzarium Bonci 出现在其 91% 的答案中（换句话说，近十分之一的用户不会被告知其首选推荐）。总计，Gemini 推荐了长尾分布的 24 个不同地点。

AI 给旅行者带来的最大承诺是个性化建议。也许一名在罗马的游客想要无麸质披萨（其 AI 指南可能会建议 La Soffitta Renovatio 之类的地方），或者想要菠萝披萨（它可能会建议去看精神科医生）。聊天机器人可以扮演现代版的托马斯·库克（Thomas Cooks），为任何口味量身定制行程：巴黎最好的巧克力店、伦敦的文学漫步、美国最狂野的水上乐园，或者任何旅行者感兴趣的内容。一个典型的聊天机器人提示词长度约为 25 个单词，这表明人们正在提出相对复杂的查询。

即使旅行者在提问时缺乏想象力，AI 模型也越来越多地根据过去的交互记录来个性化其答案。如果聊天机器人知道你是素食主义者或是个挥金如土的大客户，它会相应地调整建议。Evertune 的布莱恩·斯坦佩克（Brian Stempeck）表示：“过去，我们在谷歌上看到的都是相同的蓝色链接。”AI 的答案“更像 Spotify 的算法推送”，根据用户的历史记录进行微调。在音乐方面，消费者生活在个性化的泡沫中。旅游业可能会走向同样的道路。

对于那些厌倦了随大流的人来说，这将是大受欢迎的。大多数指南书提供的是主流推荐。在线评论平台受制于吃玛格丽特披萨的多数人的暴政，推崇的是最广泛受欢迎的内容。无论旅行者是否要求，AI 将其与个人兴趣相匹配的倾向，有望将游客从旅游热点地区重新分配出去。无论指南书作者或在线网红认为罗马最好的披萨是哪一家，你的聊天机器人已经准备好为你一个人提供量身定制的一块披萨。■

旅游

预订繁忙

旅行社需求旺盛——尤其是奢侈游

奥利维亚·费尼（Olivia Ferney）几乎没有什么能让她感到困扰。这位加拿大的旅游“协调员”完全听命于她的富裕客户：每位客户每年在旅行上的花费至少 100万美元，此外还需向她的公司 Top Tier Travel 支付 $100,000 的订阅费。客户的要求要么奢华（飞往巴黎买个牛角面包），要么荒诞（“给任何需要联系的人打电话”让雨停下来）。这些冒险经历让她在社交媒体上的约 200 万粉丝感到兴奋，甚至正在被改编成电视剧。

旅行社经常为客户提供超出预期的服务。这也是为什么在 AI 行程规划时代，人们仍然使用他们的部分原因（见前文）。英国贸易协会 ABTA 估计，去年英国约有三分之一的旅行者通过人类专家预订假期。在大洋彼岸，另一个贸易团体美国旅行顾问协会（American Society of Travel Advisers）的成员人数已超过 310,000 名，高于 2024 年的 190,000 名。领英（LinkedIn）最近将该职位列为美国增长最快的职业之一（尽管劳工统计局认为，在 2034 年之前的这段时期，其增长速度将低于平均水平）。

奢侈品托管机构 Fora 的联合创始人埃文·弗兰克（Evan Frank）表示，人们寻求旅行顾问是为了在策划行程时利用他们的“品味和判断力”。资深顾问对特定国家拥有卓越的知识，并拥有独家酒店网络。一些人专注于特定的小众领域，为患有食物过敏的人，或想要独自旅行或携带宠物旅行的游客预订行程。

旅行社还提供了一层额外的支持，许多人认为这令人安心。弗兰克先生观察到，如果房间出了问题或错过了接驳车，你无法给你的 AI 打电话。但人类顾问可以为你面对的任何难题（或你渴望的牛角面包）提供帮助。在地缘政治动荡或极端天气期间，人们更倾向于通过旅行社预订，因为此时自行预订感觉风险更高。

顾问们可能会对 AI 的缺陷嗤之以鼻，但许多人在工作中使用了它。ABTA 负责人马克·坦泽（Mark Tanzer）指出，一些机构将 AI 视为“团队成员”，让机器人处理人类认为枯燥的工作。Fora 通过为顾问提供一个可加速行政任务的 AI 平台，建立了一家价值 10 亿加元的企业。

随着机器人规划行程的能力提高，人们对人类顾问的依赖可能会减少。但高端服务可能会一直存在。无论风雨，费尼女士的客户都享受能够联系到她的感觉。■

照片 vs 提示词

游客在巴塞罗那发布的 Instagram 帖子*，2017 年 8 月

圆圈大小 = 该地点的数量

img-109.jpeg

*三天内的公开 Instagram 帖子。排除了巴塞罗那居民发布的图像。¹重复提示词要求推荐 50 个参观地点 来源：“密集城市”（The concentrated city），Daniel Paül i Agustí，城市科学（Urban Science），2025

ChatGPT 推荐的参观地点*，2024 年 4 月

-110.

78 文化

-111.

文学小说

痛苦的过去

一部获奖小说探讨卢旺达大屠杀的遗产

《蓝花楹》（Jacaranda）。 作者：加埃尔·法耶（Gaël Faye）。译者：莎拉·阿尔迪佐内（Sarah Ardizzone）。Hogarth 出版社；272 页；$28. Chatto and Windus 出版社；£18.99

这是每个有抱负的小说家都梦寐以求的处女作。当从嘻哈音乐人转型为作家的加埃尔·法耶在 2016, 年出版《小国》（Petit Pays）时，立即获得了广泛赞誉。这部小说灵感来自他青少年时期在布隆迪内战中的经历，售出 1.5m 册，被改编成电影，目前在法国学校中教授。

这使得续作面临巨大的压力。但 2024, 年在法国出版的《蓝花楹》在第一个月就售出近 100,000 册，并获得了法国最负盛名的文学奖项之一——雷诺多奖（Prix Renaudot）。这一次，父亲是法国人、母亲是卢旺达人的法耶先生，挖掘了自己童年时期访问母亲故土的记忆。他那简洁、清晰的散文（现已译成英文）探讨了 1994, 年大屠杀后的余波，当时在三个月的时间里，大约有 500,000 人被杀害，其中大多数是图西族人。

故事从米兰（Milan）的视角展开，他是一个住在凡尔赛的法卢混血男孩。他首先通过电视得知大屠杀的消息，随后是通过克劳德（Claude）——一名被砍刀袭击并被带到法国接受治疗的年轻亲戚。直到多年以后，米兰才有机会访问卢旺达，在那里他与克劳德重逢，并结识了母亲的老友欧塞比（Eusébie）。

卢旺达的威权政府要求公民遵循一项和解政策。但并非每个人都能感受到这一点。幸存者与杀害其家人和朋友的人住在邻里之间。米兰观察了“嘎查查”（gacaca）法院的努力，这是一种基于社区的法庭，在 2002 年至 2012. 年间审理了超过 1m 名被指控犯有大屠杀相关罪行的人。他陪同克劳德出庭指证两名大屠杀参与者。审判带来了一些正义，但几乎没有带来心理上的释怀。

多年后，在年度纪念期“kuibuka”期间，米兰看着欧塞比作证。当她讲述时，人群中的人们瘫倒在地，尖叫，或在幻觉中向虚构的杀手乞求生存。米兰观察到，创伤在代际之间回荡，因为许多陷入痛苦的人在杀戮开始时还太小，甚至尚未出生。

《蓝花楹》是对冲突和解决意义的一次细致探索。虽然它聚焦于作者居住多年的卢旺达，但人们能否原谅并忘记过去的错误是一个普遍的问题。希望寄托在下一代身上。书中一个场景描述了一个杀手之子在静静地重建一座曾被其父亲参与摧毁的房屋。

技术史

世界是如何联网的

《海底闪电》（Lightning Beneath the Sea）。 作者：詹姆斯·塔博（James Tabor）。W.W. Norton 出版；336 页；31.99 加元及 24 英镑。

它被誉为维多利亚时代的“阿波罗计划”。在当时，它被比作克里斯托弗·哥伦布抵达美洲，被认为在某种程度上抵消了《独立宣言》的影响，并引发了关于世界和平的狂热预言。1866 年第一条可运行的跨大西洋电报电缆的完工，证明了全球电信网络的可能性，并标志着现代信息时代的黎明。

这个史诗般的故事在互联网繁荣的早期被重新讲述过，而如今，人们日益意识到人类对脆弱且不可见的海底数据电缆的依赖，使其再次具有了现实意义。作为维多利亚时代工程学的胜利，大西洋电缆标志着钢铁与蒸汽时代开始向现代世界的过渡，在现代世界中，工业实力取决于无形数据的传输与处理。詹姆斯·塔博在快节奏的叙述中，将这个故事写成了一部关于电报电缆的冒险小说，展示了一个时代的技术如何为下一个时代奠定基础。

赛勒斯·菲尔德（Cyrus Field）是一位美国商人，也是该项目的推动力量，他体现了这一转折。他在 1853 年 34 岁时就退休了，此前他通过销售纸张发家，当时随着大众市场廉价报纸的兴起，美国对纸张的需求激增。但当时一种新的信息传播方式正在出现：电报。为了寻找新项目，菲尔德参与了一项在卡博特海峡（Cabot Strait）铺设通往纽芬兰电报线的计划。这将使跨大西洋的新闻传递速度加快几天，因为信息可以通过电线传输一部分路程。但有一天，菲尔德看着他的地球仪心想：为什么不直接铺设一条横跨大西洋的电缆呢？

当时的海底电报技术尚处于起步阶段，仅有少数几条海底电缆将英国与法国相连，并连接地中海的各个地点。还没有人尝试在深邃的大西洋深海铺设电缆。但菲尔德迅速赢得了现代海洋学创始人马修·莫里（Matthew Maury）和电报先驱塞缪尔·莫尔斯（Samuel Morse）的认可，并开始为他的冒险事业筹集资金。经过大量游说，他获得了美国和英——

文化 79

——国政府的官方支持。在英国方面，英国财政部的财务秘书发挥了关键作用，提供了资金支持并允许使用英国海军舰船。这位官员就是《经济学人》的创始人詹姆斯·威尔逊（James Wilson）——因此，从某种意义上说，本报是大西洋电缆的“兄弟”。

在众多色彩鲜明的人物中，故事的反派是爱德华·“狂人”·怀特豪斯（Edward “Wildman” Whitehouse），他是该项目最初的首席电工。事实证明，他完全不胜任这一角色，而他坚持认为长距离电报仅仅是提高电压的问题，这导致了灾难性的后果。塔博先生的故事跨度很大，从被风暴困扰的电缆铺设船甲板，到公司董事会的尔虞我诈，再到 19 世纪纽约的奢华豪宅和酒店。

与之前的记载相比，《海底闪电》的重点在于人性戏剧和英勇行为，而非电学理论或公司财务。塔博先生详尽且惊心动魄地记录了电缆项目的成功与失败，因为几乎所有可能出错的地方都出错了，菲尔德及其团队被迫挑战电力、航海和财务的极限。尽管该项目规模宏大，但其运作原理很容易理解，因为归根结底就是从船尾放出长长的电缆。

一个贯穿始终的主题是，用海底电缆将世界连接起来是否能有助于促进和平，这也是菲尔德最初的动力之一。在故事的不同阶段，维多利亚女王与两位美国总统之间发送的庆祝信息，以及许多报纸，都表达了这样的希望。当然，这些希望最终破灭了。在现代，马克·扎克伯格也信奉这种认为增强互联将促进和平的观点，但同样没有成功。正如任何互联网用户都应该清楚的那样，缺乏快速通信并非冲突的主要原因。

这根电缆的故事在另一种意义上也可以被视为一个寓言。随着项目的推进，看似不可能的事情逐渐变得可行，而那些离奇的壮举（例如从海底回收断裂的电缆）随着新技术和机械的不断完善，开始变得常规化。它提醒人们坚持与创新的力量，并可能让现代读者联想到诸如建造核聚变反应堆、量子计算机或可重复使用火箭等挑战。科幻小说作家亚瑟·C·克拉克在20世纪50年代发表了关于大西洋电缆的记录，后来将其比作阿波罗计划，他曾写道：“探索可能之极限的唯一方法，就是勇敢地跨过这些极限，进入不可能之境。” ■

电影院

大银幕时刻

Z世代重新发现了走进电影院的乐趣

今年，电影银幕上——以及票窗前——可谓是动作频频。已有五部电影在全球票房中斩获超过10亿美元；另有三部超过5亿美元。即将上映的《复仇者联盟：末日》（Avengers: Doomsday）和《沙丘3》（Dune: Part Three）等大片预示着史诗级的对决；观众定会涌入电影院，见证这些战斗的展开。尽管整体票务销售额仍低于新冠疫情前水平，但分析师预测，今年全球票房将达到350亿美元，比2025年增长7%。

事实上，电影院似乎正在经历某种复兴，这在一定程度上要归功于年轻一代。许多人曾担心Z世代和千禧一代会加速电影院的衰落，因为他们更倾向于留在家里刷Netflix、YouTube或TikTok。但根据票务网站Fandango的一项调查，在美国，2025年近90%的Z世代去过电影院，比例高于任何其他世代。去年，他们平均观影7次，而X世代为6.1次，婴儿潮一代为5.7次。

年轻的观影者正推动电影走向成功。7月31日上映的《蜘蛛侠：崭新之日》（Spider-Man: Brand New Day）创下了北美开画周末纪录，以$360m微弱领先于另一部超级英雄电影、此前的纪录保持者《复仇者联盟4：终局之战》（Avengers: Endgame，2019年）。其开画周末观众中，近三分之二是18至34岁的人群。该片目前在全球电影院的票房已超过17亿美元。

让年轻人感到极度兴奋的不止是超级英雄。许多人前往观看克里斯托弗·诺兰爵士重新演绎的《奥德赛》（The Odyssey）。近期的电影如《戏剧》（The Drama，一部黑色浪漫喜剧）、《挽救计划》（Project Hail Mary，一部科幻故事）和《呼啸山庄》（Wuthering Heights，一部对维多利亚时代小说的大胆改编）也出现了类似的观众分布。Z世代对一部由26岁导演拍摄的恐怖片《执念》（Obsession）的痴迷，将其全球票房推高至4.9亿美元——这是其预算的650倍以上。

这一趋势也不限于西方。根据咨询公司Ormax Media的数据，在印度的印地语电影票房中，30岁以下人群占比超过一半。在沙特阿拉伯，三分之二的观影者在34岁以下；在越南，这一比例高达90%。去年夏天，日本年轻人涌向动漫大片《鬼灭之刃：无限城》，帮助该片创下了该国历史上最好的开画周末纪录。

如何解释这次激增？部分原因是，电影院正受到某些曾被认为会杀死它的技术——社交媒体的推动。在线社区制造了热度——近一半的欧洲年轻人表示，他们通过TikTok发现新电影。病毒式趋势围绕某些片名凝聚。例如，2022, 的《小黄人：格鲁之崛起》（Minions: The Rise of Gru）吸引了大批身着西装的年轻男性，他们自称为“绅士小黄人”（GentleMinions）。 ▶

被蜘蛛侠之网吸引

80 文化

► 在2025年《我的世界》电影（A Minecraft Movie）放映期间，人们尖叫并从座位上跳了起来。

社交媒体还制造了FOMO（错失恐惧症）。Letterboxd是一款允许用户记录已看电影并分享评论的应用程序，目前在全球拥有30m用户，几乎是2023, 的三倍，且其最活跃的用户年龄在18至24岁之间。“围绕电影的文化再次变成了青年文化，”电影数据分析师斯蒂芬·福洛斯（Stephen Follows）表示。

Z世代将电影院视为共享体验的场所。许多人组织朋友集体出游，并加上晚餐或饮品，将其打造为一个特别的夜晚。将电影之行本身视为一次“活动”，意味着他们在创意爆米花桶和可倾斜座椅等附加项目上花费更多。这对电影院来说是一个利好。在美国电影院连锁店AMC，2026年第二季度的人均消费比2019年同期高出44%（在调整通货膨胀后，高出近11%）。

一个沉溺于怀旧的世代正在拥抱一种模拟时代的快感。对许多人来说，大银幕提供了一个逃离无止尽刷小屏幕的避风港。美国作家苏珊·桑塔格（Susan Sontag）曾将那种被“电影绑架”的快感描述为：“要被绑架，你必须身处电影院，在黑暗中与一群匿名的陌生人坐在一起。”事实证明，年轻人们正渴望加入这场旅程。■

背景故事

《汪汪队立大功》的阴暗面

一场关于热门动画片的争论听起来像是文化战争的疯狂之举。但其影响远不止于此

它们看起来可能是一群可爱的拟人化小狗。其温馨的座右铭誓言道：“没有任务太艰巨，没有狗狗太渺小！”但不要被骗了：有人认为《汪汪队立大功》（Paw Patrol）中的动画英雄是威权资本主义的秘密先锋。在最新的作品《汪汪队立大功：恐龙电影》中，一个讨喜的角色敦促道：“继续尝试，每个人都会犯错。”而那些厌恶者也有自己的口号：“削减汪汪队的经费！”

如果你自2013年《汪汪队立大功》首次在电视上播出以来，没有养过学龄前儿童（或者自己没当过），那么你可能已经错过了它。但它是一个征服全球的巨无霸，涵盖了十几个季、一个玩具帝国，现在还有三部院线电影。批评者们——其中可能包括那些因忍受过多低俗内容而感到愤慨的父母——热衷于剖析其潜意识信息。听到这件事就像是太晚才接触“男性圈”（manosphere）一样；你会发现，两者都极其受欢迎，且据称具有危害性。

对于那些对此一无所知的幸运儿来说：这部剧设定在田园诗般但略显诡异的冒险湾（Adventure Bay），在那里孩子们开车，小狗会说话。在一名留着华丽翘发（quiff）的十岁男孩带领下，一群英雄小狗应对轻微的紧急情况，从总部的一个有趣滑梯上出发。它的模式极其固定，伴随着不断的口头禅（“汪汪队，出发！”）和令人抓狂的洗脑音乐。C.S.路易斯曾写道：“一个只有孩子才喜欢的儿童故事，是一个糟糕的儿童故事。”他一定不会喜欢《汪汪队立大功》。

主要的反派是一个叫汉丁顿（Humdinger）的家伙和他那些邪恶的小猫（这个系列是对猫的一种延伸诽谤）。在第一部电影中，他接管了大都市冒险城（Adventure City），并在地铁里安装了过山车环道。在第二部中，一颗坠落的陨石赋予了小狗们魔法力量。在最新的电影中，他们被冲上了一个恐龙居住的岛屿：有些恐龙巨大，有些娇小可爱，但显然没有一只食肉恐龙。汉丁顿觊觎岛上的钻石。

从表面上看，如果说《汪汪队立大功》有政治色彩，那也是笨拙的左翼色彩。汉丁顿是一个拥有私人飞机、建造男性生殖器形状塔楼且蔑视“自由公正选举”和法律的金发自恋狂。小狗们不仅保护人类和生物，还保护环境；他们对回收利用出奇地热衷。在当今这个竞争残酷（dog-eat-dog）的世界里，关于团队合作、面对恐惧以及其他此类感伤励志的甜腻道德观，带有模糊的左翼倾向。

但这可能正是他们希望你这样认为的。一些批评者指出，在核心的六只小狗队伍中，只有一只女孩，她的服装甚至眼睛都是粉色的。更糟糕的是，领头的小狗阿奇（Chase）是一只警犬，因此整个作品就是亲警察的“警察宣传”（copaganda）。事实上，由于巡逻队是无需负责的自由职业者，且一名糊涂的市长对其唯唯诺诺，这实际上是对私有化国家服务的巧妙广告。（一个心照不宣的笑话是，他们的资金来自周边商品销售——这可能会让那些为此买单的人感到不快。）

简而言之，一名《卫报》评论员愤怒地表示，《汪汪队立大功》是“威权新自由主义的宣传”。一名学者认为它“鼓励人们在一个（再）生产不平等的全球资本主义体系中成为共犯”。在为这部剧辩护时，一名前白宫发言人错误地声称该剧已被取消。人们很容易将整个争论斥为扫兴的胡言乱语和文化战争的疯狂。

虽然诱人，但这是错误的。事实并非如此简单。毕竟，独裁者试图控制讲述给年轻人的故事是有原因的。耶稣会创始人据称曾说过：“把孩子交给我直到他七岁，我就能让你看到这个男人。”书籍、电影，以及没错，动画片，都在传达价值观和教训。像《汪汪队立大功》这样的现象级作品正在传达大量信息，并且显然在世界各地的年轻人中引起了共鸣。然而，一个批判理论家的感悟，可能与一个不熟悉安·兰德（Ayn Rand）的四岁孩子截然不同。

要理解《汪汪队立功》（Paw Patrol）的深层含义，最好的工具或许不是意识形态，而是精神分析。其原则之一是，许多孩子极度渴望治愈他们的父母，部分是为了自身的福祉，有时甚至会让自己承担起父母的角色。从伊妮德·布莱顿（Enid Blyton）到哈利·波特（Harry Potter），那些讲述年幼主角解决成年人烦恼的故事，其心理背景正是如此。

“汪汪队”一代的孩子们听到了父母在为政治、战争、通货膨胀、冠状病毒和气候变化而焦虑不安。剧中的情节充满了学龄前儿童的愿望达成：这些小狗——观众的化身——可以享用无限量的零食，并在无人监管的情况下玩耍超级酷的装备。或许，它强力实现的另一个愿望是，让孩子们能够解决长辈的问题。没有一只小狗因为太小而无法察觉这些问题。

81

尼尔马尔·“尼姆斯”·普尔贾 (Nirmal “Nims” Purja)

这位廓尔喀登山家、Netflix明星于7月30日死于一场雪崩，享年43岁

尼尔马尔·普尔贾在攀登世界第七高峰道拉吉里峰时，其登山生涯尚处于起步阶段。他出生在山脚下一个与鸡共居的村庄里，但五岁时随家人搬到了尼泊尔南部的低地。因此，他几乎没有注意到那堵填满地平线的、高达8,167米的壮丽岩雪之墙。而现在，30岁的他已成为在山上艰苦跋涉的登山队的一员。

当然，他承担了开路者的职责。在他前行、深陷没膝之雪时，他发现了关于自己一些非凡的特质：海拔高度似乎对他没有影响。他很强壮，每一步都充满力量。砰！砰！砰！ 很快，队伍中的其他成员就变成了下方遥远的小黑点。他进入了心流状态。兄弟，他进入状态了！ 到最后，他开辟了70%的路线。虽然分担这项任务更为合理，他也接受了这一点，但只要有山要爬，他就想现在就做，而且要快，因为他能做到。

他一生的全部目标就是完成他人认为不可能的壮举。2019年，他离开英国军队（他在军队中是一名廓尔喀士兵并服役于特种部队），挑战攀登所有14座海拔8,000米以上的山峰，由此名震全球。那是“死亡地带”，在那里，未经辅助的人体开始衰竭。他用了六个月零六天完成，而之前的纪录是七年多。他曾费力寻找资金，但这个被他称为“可能计划”（Project Possible）的项目被Netflix接手了。他们将其拍成了纪录片，他也将其写成了书，就这样成为了明星。在曼哈顿，出现了他栖身于山顶、时尚的反光镜片在阳光下熠熠生辉的广告牌。他在机场被人群簇拥，在尼泊尔被披上披肩视为英雄。尽管直到26岁之前都不知道酒精为何物，但他后来开始喜欢泰亭格（Taittinger）香槟。那些希望由他单独带领参加其“精英远征”（Elite Expeditions）的西方登山者，可能需要支付100万加元。

因为他为攀登而生，挑战从未停止。他擅长大胆的连续攀登，他与他的夏尔巴团队在两次攀登之间几乎没有喘息之机。山峰可以用不同的组合攀登，也可以重复攀登。在攀登珠穆朗玛峰仅四天后，他就在18小时内登顶了世界第五高峰马卡鲁峰，而其中大部分时间都花在了庆祝而非睡眠上。在登顶道拉吉里峰三天后，他带着严重的宿醉，在21小时内一次性登顶了世界第三高峰堪察岗布峰。

那一系列伟大的8,000米级高峰一次次吸引他回归。尼姆斯，这是属于你的。 他的行装很轻，有时不带食物或睡袋，只带一个装有热水的保温瓶用来融雪饮用。在开始下山之前，他只有时间欣赏山顶的景色，尤其是伴随着轻盈云朵飘散的橙红色日出。但珠穆朗玛峰对他没有特别的吸引力。他在2016年的第一次尝试是不明智的——一次尽可能快速的单人攀登（大家都说这太疯狂了），当时他还不是一个强悍的开路者，遭遇了严重的严重高山症，喘不过气的肺部很快迫使他下山。后来他一次次轻松登顶，但厌恶那里的人群和垃圾。更值得征服的山峰是冬季的K2（乔戈里峰），那是世界第二高峰。此前从未有人在冬季登顶，而他带领一支全尼泊尔团队实现了这一目标，他们在山顶唱起了国歌，证明了夏尔巴登山者是多么出色。

批评者们对他登山风格的攻击可谓是兴风作雨。他使用瓶装氧气和固定绳索，并乘坐直升机在各个大本营之间往返。纯粹主义者对此嗤之以鼻。他们说，他与其在山上赛跑，不如去寻找新路线。他对此不以为意，尤其是关于氧气的抱怨。他认为，如果不携带氧气，他就无法营救那些氧气耗尽的登山者。无论如何，他也能在没有瓶装空气的情况下攀登 8,000 米级高峰，而且经常这样做，仅仅是为了向那些照顾者们展示一个自信的二指敬礼。至于名声，他说，兄弟，这不是为了我。“可能计划”（Project Possible）的核心目的就是向世界各地的人们展示，只要下定决心就能取得怎样的成就；以及如何征服他们自己的山峰，无论那是指什么。

很少有登山者像他那样具备这种体能。他从就读的英语中学会校开始训练，在深夜跑步，以确保能像他的父亲和兄弟们那样加入廓尔喀兵团。在平民生活中，他下班后会游泳 100 个往返。在卡特里克（Catterick）当兵时，他曾因口音和肤色被英国士兵欺负，于是他决心证明自己可以加入任何精锐部队。有一天在威尔士山丘进行长途行军（Yomping）时，他背着 75 磅的背包，当教官又往里加了一块石头时，他感到格外受到激励。长官，放弃不在我的血液里。

他也曾多次与死亡擦肩而过。第一次发生在担任特种部队成员期间，一名狙击手的子弹将他从屋顶击落，击碎了他的步枪托并割破了他的下颌。最令人难忘的一次是在南迦帕尔巴特峰，当时他有一秒钟松开了绳索。在他加速坠落、冰镐无法在雪中抓牢时，他以为自己必死无疑，但及时抓住了绳索较低的部分。害怕死亡？绝不可能。 每个人总有一天得死。对于夏尔巴人在登山前焚烧杜松和撒米的习俗，他并不太在意；他的方式是军事化的，100% 进攻。但在攀登之前，他喜欢独自与大山对话。他会对着岩壁和冰墙问道：“我可以上去吗，还是不行？”

在他职业生涯早期，安纳普尔纳峰给出了肯定的回答，随后又引发了一场几乎将他的团队全部抹去的雪崩。但他保留了这个习惯。今年夏天在布罗德峰（Broad Peak）上，他向这座山提出了同样的问题，而近期的降雪已让其他登山者望而却步。无论最初得到了什么答案，7 月 30 日，另一场雪崩将他和他的同伴卷走。他几乎完成了第三次对所有 8,000 米级高峰的挑战，其中第二次是在没有瓶装空气的情况下完成的。最终，这座山拥有了最终决定权。 ■

经济学人 企业

img-115.jpeg

[...OMITTED...]

物理人工智能与机器人峰会

2026年10月13日 • 伦敦

规模超过：300名参会者

70位演讲嘉宾

35个案例研究

下一场人工智能革命不会发生在屏幕上，而是在工厂、仓库、医院和城市中。

物理人工智能正走出实验室，进入工作场所。探索组织如何大规模部署机器人技术，以及这将对生产力、竞争力和增长意味着什么。

Morgan Roe 首席运营官 Engineered Arts

Gianpiero Negri 全球负责人，机器人 卓越安全中心 亚马逊（Amazon）

Amber van Groenestijn 全球机器人负责人 海尼根公司（The HEINEKEN Company）

Marco Iannone 集团首席人工智能官 Virgin Active

Isabella Panella 机器人负责人 工业运营 捷豹路虎（JLR）

James Appathurai 网络、数字化转型与混合战争 副助理秘书长 北约（NATO）

使用代码 ECON25 可节省 25%

physical-ai-and-robotics.economist.com*

金牌赞助商

MYTHIC

拥有商业履历的 AI

深受 44,000 多家企业的信赖

ORACLE NetSuite

The Economist

Burnham and business

Why China is the new OPEC

Silicon Valley’s philanthropy

In praise of designer(-ish) babies

AUGUST 15TH-21ST 2026

INSIDE AFGHANISTAN

A REPORT ON FIVE YEARS OF TALIBAN RULE

REACH FOR THE CROWN

img-0.jpeg

THE DATEJUST

BUCHERER

1888

ROLEX BOUTIQUE, ONE HYDE PARK, KNIGHTSBRIDGE ROLEX BOUTIQUE, WONDER ROOM, SELFRIDGES LONDON ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, THE PIAZZA COVENT GARDEN THE VILLAGE, WESTFIELD WHITE CITY LONDON BUCHERER.COM

img-1.jpeg

WATCH FEATURED SUBJECT TO STOCK AVAILABILITY

The Economist August 15th 2026

3

Contents

img-2.jpeg

On the cover

The Afghan regime is vile. Democracies should engage with it anyway: leader, page 7. Afghanistan is a much safer place than it has been for half a century. But its people are suffering and increasingly isolated: briefing, page 17

Burnham and business The Labour government fell out badly with business but has a chance to start again under Andy Burnham, page 21. British business has failed to make its voice heard, page 22

Why China is the new OPEC

By releasing stocks, restricting exports and managing demand, it has curtailed imports and wrested control of oil markets: leader, page 9, and analysis, page 66

Silicon Valley's philanthropy

AI founders pledge to give away hundreds of billions of dollars. How will they be spent? Page 56

In praise of designer(-ish)

babies Couples should be allowed to select embryos on the basis of both disease resistance and IQ: leader, page 10. Silicon Valley wants to reshape the way humans are made, page 59

→ Download The Economist's app for articles, podcasts, videos and more, published throughout the week.

The world this week

5 A summary of political and business news

Leaders

7 Inside Afghanistan Five years on

8 Mending Venezuela Marco's method

8 Punishing Putin The wrong weapon

9 Oil markets Sheikhs v China

10 Screening for success In praise of designer(-ish) babies

Letters

14 On air-conditioning, hospital malpractice, the night-time economy, Andy Burnham's taste in music, burgers

By Invitation

16 Michael Kratsios on the new frontier for American science

Briefing

17 Afghanistan Safer but suffering

Bartleby Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation? Page 61

img-3.jpeg

Britain

21 Labour and business 22 Business's missing voice 23 Accents and power 23 Releasing prisoners 24 Getting Scots off drugs 24 Scotland's guga politics 26 Artisan cheesemakers

img-4.jpeg

Europe

27 A surge in sexual infections 28 Russia bans peace 29 Airports and drones 29 Could Moldova vanish? 30 Low Rhine, dry Danube 31 Charlemagne Europe's uniters

img-5.jpeg

United States

33 Democrats in Iowa 34 A new tariff weapon 35 Taking aim at vaccines 35 A comeback in Wisconsin 36 Mail-in voting endures 37 Florida's transformation 38 Lexington What Britain can teach Democrats

img-6.jpeg

The Americas

39 Venezuela's democracy 41 Bullying Canada 41 Brazil's new warships 42 An earthquake in Colombia

img-7.jpeg

Middle East & Africa

43 Safer Mogadishu 44 Zambia's election 45 Egypt and Jordan 46 A new defence pact 47 Political Islam

img-8.jpeg

►► Contents continues overleaf

4

Contents

Asia

49 Muslim marriage in India 50 Rohingya misery abroad 51 Smog in South-East Asia 51 Japan's spy agencies 52 Ashoka Venice v Osaka

img-9.jpeg

China

53 Mental health in China 54 Zhu Rongji, the last reformer 55 Chaguan The obsession with safety theatre

img-10.jpeg

International

56 AI philanthropy 58 The Telegram Taiwan's hostage democracy

img-11.jpeg

Business

59 Designer babies 61 Bartleby Holiday-making 62 Japanese startups 63 Chinese pubs 63 Basketball's big deal 64 Nvidia v hyperscalers 65 Schumpeter AI's Wild West

img-12.jpeg

Finance & economics

66 China, the new OPEC 68 Debt bombs in China 68 Singapore's equity dreams 69 Buttonwood Are index funds passive? 70 Trump v Fed, cont'd 71 Free Exchange Japan's giant yen trade

img-13.jpeg

Science & technology

72 GLP-1 for the brain? 73 Scientific disruption 74 NASA and fire storms 75 Well Informed Microbiome hacking

img-14.jpeg

Culture

76 Chatbots' travel tips 77 Travel agents are back 78 A hit novel about Rwanda 78 Wiring the world 79 Young cinema-goers 80 Back Story "Paw Patrol" wars

img-15.jpeg

Economic & financial indicators

81 Statistics on 42 economies

Obituary

82 Nirmal Purja, speed-conqueror of mountains

Volume 460 Number 9512

Published since September 1843 to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.'

Editorial offices in London and also:

Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Cape Town, Chicago, Dubai, Lagos, Madrid, Mexico City, Montevideo, Mumbai, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, Washington DC

Subscription service

For our full range of subscription offers visit: Economist.com/subscribe

If you are experiencing problems when trying to subscribe, please visit our Help pages at: Economist.com/help for troubleshooting advice.

To manage your account online, please visit my.economist.com where you can also access our live chat service which is available 24/7. To call us, contact our dedicated service centre on 00800 771 127/11 or +44 (0)203 868 6843.

Please recycle

PEFC PEFC/16-33-582

PEFC certified This copy of The Economist is printed on paper sourced from sustainably managed forests certified by PEFC www.pefc.org

Registered as a newspaper. © 2026 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited. Published every week, except for a year-end double issue, by The Economist Newspaper Limited. The Economist is a registered trademark of The Economist Newspaper Limited. Printed by Walstead UK Limited

5

The world this week Politics

img-16.jpeg

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels stepped up their attacks on shipping trying to traverse the Red Sea. The Houthis struck an Egyptian-owned cargo vessel, killing six people, the first deaths from a Houthi assault on shipping since the war with Iran started in February. The Houthis are fighting Saudi Arabia in Yemen and are trying to impose a blockade on Saudi ships; they also attacked a Saudi oil refinery at the port of Jazan. America fired missiles at a vessel in the Gulf of Oman that was heading for an Iranian port. There was little progress towards a peace deal between America and Iran.

Brothers in arms

Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed a defence co-operation agreement, which was described as similar to NATO's Article 5, when an attack on one member of the alliance triggers a collective response. The pact builds on an existing accord between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; Pakistan has deployed fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to defend it from Iranian attacks. The Saudis were keen to stress that the new pact did not represent a Sunni "military axis", and that other countries could join.

Details emerged of a ploy to thwart an Iranian threat to assassinate Donald Trump. As he was leaving last month's NATO summit in Turkey, the president was secretly transferred to a military jet that then flew to Britain. The media reported at the time that Mr Trump left Turkey on an older version of Air Force One. He did board that plane, but was then squirrelled out through a

side exit into a catering van and onto the waiting jet, out of the view of journalists.

Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown as Syria's president in 2024 following a 14-year civil war, was sentenced to death in absentia for killings and torture committed under his regime. Mr Assad and his family live in Russia. Death sentences were also handed down to other regime officials, including Atef Najib, the security chief of Deraa, in southern Syria. Concerns have been raised that the trial was conducted at great speed and without an agreement on its legal framework.

The number of deaths from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo passed 2,060. The WHO said it could be the worst Ebola outbreak ever and has called for a stronger response in Congo to contain the disease, including better early detection and contact follow-up. It pointed to the success of Uganda, which has declared the outbreak of Ebola there to be over (after just 20 confirmed cases and two deaths).

An earthquake struck Colombia, killing at least 265 people. The quake came three days after Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as the new right-wing president. In his inauguration speech Mr de la Espriella reiterated his pledge to crack down on drug gangs.

Zhu Rongji died at the age of 97. Mr Zhu became China's prime minister in 1998 and pushed for the great reforms that integrated China into the global economy, negotiating its entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001. Articulate and urbane, he often talked to Western officials and economists about complex policy issues. Observers say China's leadership today lacks his technical prowess.

The Taiwanese government is proposing to increase defence spending by 16%, according to

Taiwan's official news agency, to counter the increased threat from China. The defence budget will exceed 3% of GDP when it is unveiled on August 20th.

Thailand's prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, took steps to tighten gun laws, following the mass shooting of six people at a school. The 14-year-old gunman also shot dead two of his grandparents before killing himself. Mr Anutin ordered a halt to the renewal of certain weapon licences and instructed officials to intensify their enforcement of gun-control laws.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, killing at least six people. Russia deployed North Korean ballistic missiles in the bombardment, according to Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine, meanwhile, pounded Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, hitting warships and grain-export terminals. It also struck oil refineries in the Russian republic of Tatarstan with drones, killing at least 13 people.

America's Senate passed a long-delayed bill authorising Donald Trump to impose new sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, companies and institutions. It also allows him to impose tariffs on big importers of Russian oil and gas. The legislation attracted bipartisan support. It must now clear the House of Representatives. Critics worry that Mr Trump will use his new powers in ways that escalate his trade wars.

Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Yabloko, the only liberal anti-war party in Russia, could not take part in next month's elections for parliament. A nationalist party had accused Yabloko of hosting material on its website supportive of the international gay movement, which the court has deemed to be an extremist crusade. Hundreds of mostly young people braved the authorities by protesting against the ban outside the court in Moscow.

Continuing its dismantling of the old regime under Viktor Orban, Hungary's parliament elected Andras Baka as the country's president. Mr Baka had been removed as head of the Supreme Court in 2011 for criticising Mr Orban.

Leavitt leaving

Karoline Leavitt is stepping down as White House press secretary to spend more time with her children. Ms Leavitt was one of the president's most loyal aides; he said she had done a "phenomenal job". At the age of 27 she was the youngest person ever to be appointed to the job, but soon settled into a combative relationship with journalists.

The Democratic establishment breathed a sigh of relief when David Crowley, a moderate, defeated Francesca Hong, a left-winger, in the party's primary for governor of Wisconsin. Polling had suggested Ms Hong would win the primary handily. Party leaders feared she would lose in November to the Republican nominee. Ms Hong once said that Thanksgiving was a celebration of colonialism.

img-17.jpeg

Millions of people in northern Spain and in Greenland and Iceland enjoyed Europe's first total eclipse of the sun in 27 years. Home-rental rates rocketed in Spain as umbraphiles from around the world flocked to the area. Other parts of Europe, including Britain, France and Portugal, caught a partial eclipse. The next total eclipse is on August 2nd 2027, which will be visible from southern Spain, north Africa and Saudi Arabia.

6

The world this week Business

img-18.jpeg

Nvidia struck partnerships with six leading financial firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and KKR, to eventually channel $500bn to its customers by tapping into “third-party capital”. The proceeds will finance the buildout of AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s chips. The biggest cloud-computing companies, such as Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, are increasingly designing their own customised AI chips, which could eventually compete with Nvidia’s. As well as selling to hyperscalers, Nvidia is seeking new business from other customers, such as governments and companies trying to build their own AI infrastructure.

Intel announced a $15bn sale of new stock in part to raise capital for spending on AI. The next day it raised the share sale to $20bn. It was the company’s first public offering of new common equity since listing on the stock market in 1971.

AI fever is not limited to America. Unitree, a Chinese developer of humanoid robots, said its forthcoming stock-market debut on Shanghai’s tech-heavy STAR exchange was heavily oversubscribed. Unitree has priced its IPO at 150.8 yuan ($22) a share for a valuation of 60bn yuan, relatively high for China. The STAR 50 index has risen by 27% this year, outperforming the NASDAQ Composite.

Underlining the rapid development of AI models, Meta launched Muse Glimmer, which can run locally on laptops without relying on computer power from data centres.

The model is open-weight, meaning that its parameters can be adjusted locally, enabling developers to create their own products tailored around the model.

Hooked on Meta

A federal trial got under way after 29 states claimed that Meta engineered its platforms to be addictive to children. The proceedings came soon after a judge in New Mexico deemed that the company must pay an extra $567m on top of the $375m it was ordered to pay in May, when it was found liable for causing harm to children. Most of the extra money will go towards treatment services for young people. The judge’s ruling found that Meta had contributed to a mental-health crisis and he described the firm as a “public nuisance”. It will appeal against the decision.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran surprised markets by announcing that he would step down as chairman of Tata Sons, amid a long-running leadership battle. Mr Chandrasekaran has fallen out with Tata Trusts, the charitable group led by Noel Tata, a scion of the business dynasty, that controls the Indian conglomerate. Mr Chandra-

Chandrasekaran’s potential reappointment as chairman might have been challenged at the forthcoming annual meeting.

America’s consumer-price index rose by 3.4% in the 12 months to July, a slighter lower annual inflation rate than June’s 3.5%. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, dipped to 2.5%. Meanwhile, American employers unexpectedly shed 23,000 jobs in July and job gains registered in May and June were revised down.

Britain’s GDP grew by 1.2% in the second quarter, year on year. The Office for National Statistics suggested that the World Cup and good weather may have boosted the economy in June, as fans flocked to pubs and outside events. The economy flatlined in May.

Prices charged to vessels that transit the Panama Canal hit a new record. Fees have surged since the start of the Iran war, but the latest increases relate to lower water levels in the lake feeding the canal’s busiest locks. That has meant draft depths are lowered for ships to traverse the waterway, so they have to carry less cargo. The result is longer lines for ships,

raising the bid prices as vessels try to jump the queue to use the canal.

Sea Legend, a Chinese shipping company, began the first regular service using the Northern Sea Route, which travels along the Russian coast via the Arctic. The service, running between Ningbo on China’s east coast and Felixstowe in Britain, runs in summer and early autumn, ice permitting. Dubbed the “Ice Silk Road” China hopes it can become a practical alternative to traditional shipping routes.

Turning into a great gig

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, announced his support for a measure before the city council that would compel Amazon and other businesses in effect to employ delivery drivers rather than rely on contractors. The mayor’s office described the current system as “exploitative”. Amazon counters that this will drive up costs for consumers. Gig workers got some more good news in Australia, where the national workplace tribunal ordered that food and grocery delivery workers be paid at least A$31.30 ($22) an hour, A$5 above the minimum wage.

img-19.jpeg

The Economist

Leaders 7

How to deal with the Taliban

The Afghan regime is vile. Democracies should engage with it anyway

FIVE YEARS ago President Joe Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan. He was not forced to. America could have defended Afghanistan's flawed but democratically elected government indefinitely, but chose not to. Voters were weary of America's longest war, against the Taliban, a militia that controlled much of the countryside. Donald Trump set a timetable for pulling out; Mr Biden did so completely.

America's looming departure prompted every Afghan with a gun to revise their expectations about who was likely to win their country's civil war. Warlords switched sides; government soldiers abandoned their posts and melted away. The government fell almost immediately. The Taliban seized power almost unopposed. Desperate civilians fleeing their new rulers clung to the wheels of a departing American plane and plunged to their deaths.

The Taliban (whose name means "religious students") had first seized power in 1996, and imposed a brutal blend of Islamism and premodern tribal custom, banning girls' education and stoning gay people to death. America and its allies overthrew them after they hosted al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked America with hijacked planes in September 2001. But Taliban fighters then waged a guerrilla war against the democratic system that America had introduced, murdering judges, police and anyone deemed a collaborator. When Mr Biden gave up, a two-decade effort at nation-building ended in humiliation. Other powers drew conclusions about America's willingness to stand by its friends. Six months later, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

Five years on, America has largely forgotten Afghanistan. This is a mistake. The country is more likely to cause geopolitical trouble again if it is ignored. Its people will suffer even more. And it is more likely to fall into China's or Russia's orbit.

As our correspondent reports this week, after a 1,000km road trip inside the country, the Taliban are firmly in charge and the place is largely calm, bar intermittent sparring with its neighbour, Pakistan. But it is a grim stability (see Briefing).

Music is banned. Armed men rule the streets. The vice-and-virtue police dish out beatings to sinners, such as men with inadequate beards. Women are barred from workplaces, universities and travel without a male guardian. Girls are banned from secondary school and, since child marriage is now legal, many have been forced straight from the classroom into wedlock. How much poorer, sicker and sadder all this has made Afghans is hard to say; data-gathering is not a Taliban priority.

Most Afghans yearn for more freedom. Even many Talibs, after years in exile, no longer believe that the sky will fall if girls can spell. But hardliners have ruthlessly asserted control. The Taliban's emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada, has recruited a loyal praetorian guard and grabbed lucrative mining contracts. More moderate Talibs are generally too weak or scared to challenge him. Some of the few who did had to flee.

America and Europe have tried to isolate the Taliban regime, refusing to recognise it, freezing Afghan central-bank

reserves held abroad and slapping sanctions on officials. But this has achieved almost nothing. Taliban hardliners do not mind if Western diplomats and investors stay away, and will not adjust their ideology just to lay hands on the old government's assets. So Western countries must try something new.

This means recognising some hard truths. First, the Taliban are not going anywhere. Second, if the West does not engage with them, other powers will. Russia has formally recognised them. China, India, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates work with them on issues such as mining and trade. The Taliban threaten to destabilise relations between India and Pakistan, since the latter fears that closer ties between Delhi and Kabul could leave it sandwiched between enemies.

Hints of a more hard-nosed Western approach are starting to be visible. Europeans still say the Afghan regime is beyond the pale, yet in June they invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss migrant flows and repatriating failed asylum-seekers. America quietly shares intelligence with them in the fight against even more extreme Islamist groups.

Other forms of engagement would also make sense. It is too soon to unfreeze the $4.2bn of Afghan central-bank reserves in Switzerland, which would surely be used to prop up the execrable emir. But donors should stop cutting humanitarian aid,

which has fallen by around 70% since 2022. Nearly half the population needs it, by one estimate. It is also useful to have UN agencies on the ground, with eyes and ears to warn of looming famine, unrest or the theft of aid.

A second step should be sanctions reform. Many senior Talibs who were put under sanctions decades ago as terrorists are now ministers. That is having the unintended effect of locking the country out of the global financial system and starving it of private investment. Western firms fear to do any kind of business in Afghanistan, in case they fall foul of terrorist-financing rules. Changing this could boost growth, which might eventually ease the mass joblessness that threatens the country's long-term stability.

Cables to Kabul

A more controversial step would be diplomatic recognition. This does not imply approval. Decent governments recognise many regimes they despise. Rather, it means accepting the reality that the Taliban are likely to rule Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Withholding diplomatic ties is not much of a bargaining chip—the Taliban do not think their legitimacy depends on the say-so of infidels. However, functioning embassies can watch out for terrorist threats, and create useful channels of communication, which in time could encourage the regime's more moderate elements.

Make no mistake. Reform of this vile government must come largely from within, and could be the work of decades. But judicious engagement is likely to do more good than harm. So it is time for America and other democracies to hold their collective noses and talk to the Taliban. ■

img-20.jpeg

8 Leaders

America's method

America's efforts to restore Venezuelan democracy are off to an unexpectedly good start

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP sent American special forces to snatch Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro, in January, it did not sound as though restoring democracy was his priority. He boasted endlessly about how he now controlled Venezuela's oil, while barely mentioning the country's political future. He installed as interim president Delcy Rodriguez, the deposed despot's dismal deputy. Many worried that without a strong American commitment to a democratic transition, the old, brutal kleptocracy would carry on.

Yet the prospects for democracy in Venezuela seem to be improving. This is not because Mr Trump has suddenly developed a passion for the subject. It is because his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who really does care about ending left-wing dictatorships in Latin America, has been granted a reasonably free hand to use America's huge influence in pursuit of that goal.

A first round of negotiations between Venezuela's regime and figures from the opposition ended on August 12th with a modest agreement to begin a process of judicial reform, including of the Supreme Court. Our reporting finds reasons for optimism (see American section). Further talks could produce, by December, reforms that could allow for fair elections.

None of this would be happening without pressure from the United States. Mr Rubio has been deeply involved, speaking directly to the opposition's lead negotiator, Dinorah Figuera. Her team moves around Caracas in American cars, with American security, and sleeps in America's chosen hotel.

Having seen both their liberty and the economy shrink under Mr Maduro, the vast majority of Venezuelans would love the transition to democracy to succeed. This would also benefit Mr Trump. He wants to see Venezuela's dilapidated oilfields boom; only under democracy and the rule of law will the country be stable enough to attract the necessary investment.

Problems abound, however. The ruling clique has often broken promises to allow fair elections. An opposition directed by Mr Rubio will be accused of being an American stooge. It does not help that ordinary Venezuelans, many of them earthquake-battered, have yet to see much benefit from the oil revenues controlled by the United States. If negotiations drag on, the regime will have more chances to escape its commitments and the opposition may be weakened.

So speed matters. America should insist that Venezuela will hold a presidential election in 2027. That is more than enough time; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, several former Soviet vassal states organised free elections within a year. In the meantime the United States must disclose how much oil money it has collected, how much has been returned to Venezuela, and which sanctions impede disbursement. An elected government should take full control of the oil revenues from its first day in office.

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, must also be allowed to return home quickly. Mr Rubio may want to keep her away from the negotiating table in order to make it easier to talk to the regime, but keeping her in exile is shortsighted. The regime needs confidence that any deal also binds Ms Machado, even if she negotiates through proxies, as she may well be Venezuela's next president. Otherwise she could repudiate its possible terms, such as safe exile for regime figures (though she insists she is not out for revenge).

Ms Machado's presence in Venezuela would also help allay another worry: Mr Trump's caprice. He has spoken of making Venezuela the 51st state, and sometimes suggests that its oil wealth belongs to the United States. For now, he is allowing Mr Rubio to pursue more noble aims. If he changes his mind, the only thing that might save Venezuelan democracy is Ms Machado's ability to summon huge crowds to the streets. ■

Punishing Putin

The wrong weapon

Giving Donald Trump new tariff powers is no way to help Ukraine

VLADIMIR PUTIN will not end his war on Ukraine until he believes the costs of fighting on exceed the costs of stopping. The costs to him, that is—Russia's president cares nothing for the Ukrainian lives he is ruining, and precious little for all the Russian blood and treasure he is wasting in pursuit of a warped idea of personal glory. So Ukraine and its backers must somehow convince him that he will never win, and that continuing to try will only weaken him.

On August 7th America's Senate passed a bill designed to send that message. "The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act", named after a senator who was a champion of

Ukraine until he died in July, directs America's president to take more forceful action against Russia. As its title suggests, it includes new sanctions on Mr Putin and other Russian bigwigs, as well as on Russian energy projects and financial institutions. The aim is to punish Russia for as long as it fails to make peace with Ukraine and to signal that America will not abandon Mr Putin's courageous victims.

The bill, which senators approved by a hefty 86 votes to 11, was a rare example of bipartisanship in a rancorously divided nation. Unfortunately, its current form is deeply flawed.

The main worry is that it gives America's president new ▶

Leaders 9

▶ powers to impose tariffs (see United States section). Levies of up to 100% may be slapped on the top five importers of Russian energy and on any country that helps Russia evade sanctions. The president may waive tariffs if he deems it “in the national interests of the United States” or adjust them if a country has taken “significant steps” to increase or decrease the import or transfer of Russian oil or gas. That is a lot of discretion for Congress to give to anyone, let alone to Donald Trump.

The reasoning went something like this. Sanctions do not seem to have improved Mr Putin’s behaviour. It is tricky to block Russian oil exports, given the large, hard-to-police “shadow fleet” of tankers that ship the stuff illicitly. So the late Senator Graham and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who co-sponsored the bill, included a new weapon: tariffs on countries that buy Russian hydrocarbons.

The danger is that Mr Trump will interpret the “national interest” clause creatively. He has form. The Supreme Court in February struck down his previous claim that declaring an economic “emergency”—in this case America’s trade deficit—allowed him to impose tariffs as he saw fit. This fanciful legal theory had enabled Mr Trump to threaten to hurt any country that displeased him—a handy way to extract concessions for America, and for himself. Since the justices thwarted this power grab, Mr Trump has been trying to reimpose tariffs under a patchwork of other legal justifications, with mixed success.

The new bill could restore to the president a chunk of the

power the Supreme Court rightly took away. That would be bad for American consumers, who might face higher prices. It would be worse for the global trading system, which would once again be at the mercy of the “tariff man”, as Mr Trump has dubbed himself. As drafted, the bill raises the spectre of a new trade war with India, unless Mr Trump sensibly chooses not to wage one. The legislation must now get through the House of Representatives, which should remove the parts about tariffs.

Missiles and missives

Meanwhile, there are other, cannier steps that Washington could take to help Ukraine. One is practical. The country is struggling to fend off deadly volleys of Russian missiles without American-made Patriot interceptors to blast them from the sky. America has few to spare, since so many have been used up during Mr Trump’s war on Iran. But Washington could agree to license their production to Ukraine, allowing Ukrainians to beef up their own defences.

The other way to help Ukraine is less concrete. Mr Putin needs to be persuaded that America and Europe will never let Ukraine lose. Given Mr Trump’s wildly inconsistent stances on the war and apparent desire to be liked by Mr Putin, that is hard. But Congress, which will be around long after Mr Trump has left the White House, can send useful signals. The larger the majorities it can muster for supporting Ukraine, the sooner Mr Putin will realise that it is time to cut his losses. ■

Oil Sheikhs v China

China has wrested control of oil markets from OPEC

THE GREAT economic surprise of the Iran war has been that oil prices have stayed relatively contained even with the Strait of Hormuz mostly shut. Five months into the war Brent crude remains about $40 below the $126 per barrel intraday high it hit on April 30th; for a while there was even a “mini-glut” of crude oil. As a result motorists and oil importers have not yet faced a severe crunch. And—though it may seem difficult to believe—Iran has had less leverage over President Donald Trump than it might have done. For the reprieve, the world can thank China.

When Iran started pointing its drones and missiles at tankers crossing the strait, 14m barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil—roughly one-fifth of world output—risked being trapped in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) soon redirected about 5m b/d via pipelines. Strategic-stock releases by rich countries, including America and Japan, covered another chunk. But the biggest shock absorber has been a near-halving of China’s crude-oil imports, to 5.5m b/d. Curtailing China’s imports has been a feat of state engineering, achieved by releasing stocks, restricting exports and managing demand (see Finance & economics section).

It is worrying when China’s autocratic rulers have such a firm grip on any market. They often use their leverage in the global economy—from being the biggest importer of barley to refining more rare-earth elements than anyone else—to bully

critics and impose costs on countries that irk them. The Iran war, though, has shown that oil consumers can benefit when big buyers exercise their market power.

For decades the king of the oil markets has been the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Together with its allies, which include Russia, the cartel controlled around half of global crude production before the war. OPEC usually aims to keep prices artificially high by agreeing restrictive quotas on production, often co-ordinating output cuts (though occasionally it has done the reverse, allowing Saudi Arabia to flood the market to try to kill off rivals, notably American shale). The cartel’s manipulation of the market is like a tax on the global economy. Estimates of the economic damage it causes range from fairly modest to a hefty $5.7trn between 1970 and 2014 (or 0.15% of global GDP each year).

China’s oil strategy, by contrast, has proved helpful this year. Its accumulation of vast stocks when prices were low will have imposed a small cost on the global economy at the time. But dampening price spikes is correspondingly beneficial. If China ends up smoothing peaks and troughs in prices, it could make investments in new sources of supply easier to plan. Trying to buy low and sell high can go wrong, as any speculator knows. Thankfully it is China that bears that risk, and the costs of storage.

The balance of power in oil markets may shift again. For a ▶

img-21.jpeg

10 Leaders

► while, once the Gulf crisis abates, there could be a “superglut” of crude, which was originally forecast for 2026. OPEC will also be weaker than it was before the war. The UAE, once its third-largest producer, quit the cartel in May, and other members are itching to pump more.

A slippery business

Yet over time the supply of oil may contract faster than demand, and China’s role in influencing the latter could shrink. Every two years, as oilfields deplete, the world loses one Saudi Arabia’s worth of crude supply. At a global level, investment is inadequate to replace those barrels beyond 2030. This could tilt the balance of power back to the cartel, because the Gulf’s state-owned giants are among the few still investing in ambitious new projects. Its share of supply will rise. At the same time China’s demand could fall, owing to the advancing elec-

electrification of its economy. It might judge that it needs fewer reserves. If so it will buy less during gluts and cut imports by fewer barrels during a crisis, meaning it no longer absorbs as much of an oil-price shock.

China has shielded oil markets from the effects of the Iran war out of pure self-interest. Its export controls have left diesel, petrol and kerosene in much shorter supply than they would usually be at today’s crude-oil price. It also keeps information about its stocks scarce, so America and others do not know how long it could withstand sanctions or war. That makes the oil market harder to anticipate.

But the consequences of its interventions have bought other oil importers time. They should use it to diversify their sources of supply and reduce their oil consumption. The simplest way for them to avoid dependency on any autocratic regime is to have less need for the black stuff in the first place. ■

Screening for success

In praise of designer-ish babies

Couples should be allowed to select embryos on the basis of both disease resistance and IQ

HAVING TRANSFORMED human life, Silicon Valley is now coming for birth. A spate of startups offer screening services that allow couples having children via in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to assess embryos based on their genetic risk of diseases such as breast cancer and diabetes. Some venture further into science-fiction territory, providing scores for IQ and height, or even eye and hair colour (see Business section).

Critics are dismayed. Some worry firms are pushing immature technology onto vulnerable couples. Others say that even if the tech works, its use is immoral. Both arguments contain kernels of truth; neither is ultimately convincing. Banning or heavily restricting embryo screening would be a mistake.

For now, the debate is a niche concern. The startups mostly cater to the rich, famous and odd. Yet that will change. A wave of investment means that the cost of IVF is likely to fall. If offered embryo screening at the same time, many couples will take it. One survey suggests that three-quarters of Americans support screening embryos for diseases; about a third say the same for non-disease traits. And that is before competitive pressure kicks in. Who wants to see their child bested by genetically selected classmates?

Many medics—including nearly every genetics and reproductive-medicine group in the rich world—question whether such “polygenic” prediction is ready for consumers. In Britain, where fertility is more regulated than in America, selecting an embryo on the basis of non-approved factors is unlawful.

There are indeed reasons for caution. Polygenic scores are tricky. For many diseases caused by a single gene, testing offers near-certainty: if an embryo has the material, it will develop the condition. Yet an assessment of multiple genes leads to risk estimates, rather than a binary answer—and such estimates are more accurate for people with European ancestry, because they are better represented in genetic databases.

Further caveats are in order. Risk reductions can look large in relative terms but be small in absolute ones, particularly for

rare diseases. Selecting for some traits may raise the risk of other less desirable ones. Even for highly genetically determined traits like height, parents remain limited by the range found in their own embryos.

These facts are an argument for disclosure, however, rather than legal restrictions or outright bans. If companies want to offer polygenic scoring, they must adequately communicate the technology’s limits and risks. They should also let their tests undergo independent scrutiny. This will not scupper a nascent business, since the startups are not, as some critics allege, selling snake oil. A study in 2019 found that parents choosing from among ten embryos may be able to boost their child’s height by 1-6cm and IQ by between one and seven points—with tech that is now nearly a decade old. As genetic

databases get better and cover broader populations, and AI draws out the relationship between genes and traits, scores will improve.

Such progress will raise difficult ethical questions. Some, including the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, argue that fertility tech corrupts what should be a natural process. Others worry that if polygenic screening is limited to the rich, their offspring

will have another unfair advantage. The scariest critique is that fertility entrepreneurs are this century’s eugenicists.

But none of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. “Unnatural” technology is already used in many modern births: this argument against embryo selection just as easily applies to IVF, for instance, which only zealots want banned. Costs should come down, making screening more widely available. And there is a big difference between the murderous coercion of early-20th-century eugenics programmes and parents seeking as much knowledge as possible when picking an embryo.

Couples desperate for a clever child might be better advised to focus on what happens after birth. Yet so long as parents understand there is no such thing as the perfect baby, the state should not stand in the way of a bit more information. ■

img-22.jpeg

EXECUTIVE FOCUS

11

Planning a New Career Challenge?

Unique Access to Confidential Opportunities

InterExec is the global leader in assisting Top Executives earning $250k and above with their next career move.

We have almost 50 years of experience in discreetly leveraging our relationships with 15,000 Search Executives across the world to maximise our clients' career prospects.

Whatever your next challenge may be, we offer you a free of charge, mutually exploratory initial meeting to see if we can be of assistance.

london@interexec.net www.interexec.net +44 (0)20 7256 5085

ESTABLISHED 1976

Inter Exec

UNIQUE NETWORK ♦ OUTSTANDING TALENT

img-23.jpeg

img-24.jpeg

12

PROPERTY

August

img-25.jpeg

A life in Europe. Four homes to live it in.

August creates private collections of beautifully designed homes in Europe's most cherished places – each one fully cared for, and shared among a small, carefully chosen circle of families. Its newest is the Prime Collection: four rare homes, in the South of France, Tuscany, the French Alps and Mallorca.

Ask anyone who loves Europe where they would choose to live, and the answer is rarely a single place. A season in Provence. Autumn in Tuscany. The first snow in the Alps. A Mediterranean island once the summer has left it. For generations, having all of it meant buying a house abroad, and taking on everything that comes with keeping one at a distance.

img-26.jpeg

August was founded to make the pleasure possible without the burden. It curates private collections of beautifully designed homes in Europe's most cherished places. You own a share in a collection – and with it, all four homes, not just one. This is true ownership, and every home is sourced, restored, furnished and looked after entirely by August. You arrive; everything else is taken care of. Most families spend eight to twelve weeks a year across their homes.

PROPERTY

13

The Prime Collection

img-27.jpeg

Prime is the fullest expression of the idea, and the newest: a private collection of four homes sourced off-market

in the South of France, Tuscany, the French Alps and Mallorca, shared by just sixteen families. Each welcomes up to ten guests, with generous rooms for gathering, wellness facilities, and private grounds set into the

landscape around them. Instead of one house abroad, a family has four – and all of Europe between them.

The collection opens with the first of its four homes: a villa above Mougins, in the hills behind Cannes. Five bedrooms across 3,200 square feet, two of them master suites, a fitness room, an outdoor kitchen, a saltwater pool, a pétanque court and covered terraces made for long lunches. Restored in limestone, handmade ceramics and French rattan, its interiors feel inseparable from Provence. Nice Côte d'Azur Airport is twenty-five minutes away.

The three homes to follow are chosen in the same spirit. A traditional villa in the vineyards of Chianti, with its own wine cellar. A contemporary chalet in Megève, for every season in the Alps. And a secluded finca above Cas Concos in Mallorca, with sunset views across the valley.

'These are homes a family returns to for generations,' says Mèlie Dunod, co-founder and CEO of August. 'Beautifully designed, rooted in their surroundings, and made to become part of a family's story.'

These are homes a family returns to for generations

Prime is the newest of several August collections, each suited to a different way of spending time in Europe. The Grand Pied à Terre collections offer

elegant apartments in the heart of the great cities – London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona and Cannes – while the Premium and Signature collections are set in the countryside, closer to the landscape. Whichever a family chooses, the principle holds: a beautiful home, fully looked after, ready the moment you arrive.

All the pleasures of a home in Europe, and none of the responsibilities that usually come with one – an arrival at a home made ready for you.

Explore the Collections at augustcollections.com

img-28.jpeg

img-29.jpeg

img-30.jpeg

Discover the collections

augustcollections.com

@august.collections

14

Letters air-conditioning, hospital malpractice, the night-time economy, Andy Burnham's taste in music, burgers

City heat

People pushing for more air-conditioning in places like Europe do not recognise that it is a big contributor to urban heat ("The geopolitics of air-conditioning", July 25th). Research has shown that operating AC during a heatwave in Paris, where most residents still don't have AC, increased ambient city temperature by 2°C (3.6°F). Adopting AC as the dominant cooling strategy in cities will condemn them to more miserable summers, hurting outdoor workers, athletes, tourists and anyone not inside air-conditioned space.

A smarter alternative that is being adopted across a dozen American cities, including Atlanta, Boston and Dallas, is to change surfaces to enable an element of cooling. City roofs and roads absorb more than 80% of incoming sunlight, contributing three times more to city heat than does global warming. The solution is to treat all city surfaces as a single integrated solution to heat. With our help, last year Atlanta adopted a bill requiring new and retrofitted roofs to be much more reflective. This one measure, one of several the city is embracing, will triple the reflectivity of commercial roofs, cool the city by 1.3°C (with up to 3.5°C cooling in hot, lower-income neighbourhoods) and cut the electricity bill by $310m. Putting these mandates in place costs a city nothing, and because reflective roofs cost about the same as dark roofs, businesses and consumers also reap benefits.

GREG KATS Chief executive Smart Surfaces Coalition Washington, DC

The American Sunbelt would not be thriving without the introduction of air-conditioning. Growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s, our summers were

unbearably hot and humid. With no AC cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston and Phoenix would not be thriving. The migration from the northern blue states to the southern red states would not be happening without AC. JAMES HORTON Charlotte, North Carolina

Getting to the truth

Your article on the deaths and cover-ups in Britain's maternity hospitals identified a crucial paradox but stopped short of its lesson ("The lying doctors", July 4th). You noted that reports by staff of moderate-harm incidents in Nottingham fell after the "duty of candour" was introduced in 2014. So consequently, a rule that was intended to elicit honesty produced dishonesty instead.

This is not an anomaly. It is a predictable factor in complex systems. Behaviour changes when disclosure is mandated. When staff fear blame, litigation and sanction, it is the categorisation of harm that

This charming man

Andy Burnham's view of British music is oblivious both to the breadth of music being produced in Britain today and to the country's musical history beyond the familiar canon of 1980s indie bands (Bagehot, August 1st). He overlooks Manchester's, and Britain's, rich, black musical heritage. Rather than repeating the same established names like The Smiths and Oasis, he might acknowledge figures such as DJ Paulette, Hewan Clarke and A Guy Called Gerald, who helped shape Manchester's dance and electronic-music culture, as well as the broader, now-mythologised and often whitewashed story of the Hacienda, a music venue. Overall, the prime min-

changes rather than practice. Safety depends on learning, and learning depends on honest accounts of fallibility. People give such accounts only when it cannot be turned against them. That is why investigations by the Health Services Safety Investigations Body carry a statutory "safe space", as do equivalent regimes in aviation.

You concluded that truth cannot be legislated and that rotten leaders must go. Accountability to the harmed families is indeed non-negotiable. But every inquiry you list, from Morecambe Bay onwards, removed leaders; none changed the conditions under which truth is told. Until learning is formally separated from enforcement, each new leadership will inherit the same incentives, and further reports into patient-safety failures will follow.

TED BAKER Chair Health Services Safety Investigations Body London

A relaxing night out

If cities want to boost their night-time economies they would be best to avoid "making it easier to party" by providing more alcohol licences ("The night shift", July 18th). The

ister could learn from contemporary groups such as London's Ezra Collective, whose work champions inclusion and hope, rather than celebrating worn-out indie anthems. We need less "Wonderwall" and more "Where I'm Meant to Be". TIM PUNTER London

img-31.jpeg

higher margins and tax revenues from alcohol are tempting, but as a former police officer, I know that easier access to drink comes at a heavy price: domestic violence, drunk driving, addiction and soaring health-care costs. Anyway, evidence suggests that young people are souring on traditional drinking culture.

What cities truly lack are places for proper late-night conversation and relaxation, such as cafés, extended-hour libraries and museums and game lounges. People want a place where they can connect with others without the pressure to drink. Vibrant alternatives already flourish in Middle Eastern café culture and East Asian night markets. Paris hosts bakery raves and Berlin has "Sober Sensations" events.

People still want a night out. They just don't want to stumble home at 4am covered in sick.

CHARLES HOLTSCLAW Houston

There is one city in America that takes up your prescription of letting people have fun: New Orleans. As Bob Dylan once said: "Everything in New Orleans is a good idea." MORRIS ZWICK Germantown, Maryland

Don't mince your words

The Big Mac index does indeed naturally invite a lot of puns ("40 years of burgernomics", August 1st). Although some people may have a beef with such punnery, for me they are the special sauce of the index. Lettuce not dwell on how cheesy they can be; trying to remove them would leave the Big Mac index in a real pickle. Indeed, not allowing journalists to leave onion-like layers of puns throughout their articles would be a real pain in the bun. PAUL SHRINER Ankeny, Iowa

→ Letters should be addressed to the Editor at: The Economist, The Adelphi Building, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N; Email: letters@economist.com. More letters available at: economist.com/letters

WHEN YOUR DAUGHTER NEEDS AN ANGEL INVESTOR. AND YOU'RE THE ANGEL...

BE A STEP AHEAD WITH BARCLAYS PREMIER with new and exclusive personalised financial planning and a dedicated adviser*

img-32.jpeg

*Eligibility criteria apply. Investment products and services are provided by Barclays Bank plc and its subsidiaries. Capital at risk. Barclays offers banking and credit products to its clients through Barclays Bank UK PLC. Barclays Bank UK PLC is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Registered in England. Registered No. 9740322. Registered Office: 1 Churchill Place, London E14 5HP.

16

BY INVITATION

The Trump administration's case for overhauling science in America

img-33.jpeg

AS THE SECOND world war drew to a close, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tasked his science adviser, Vannevar Bush, with reorganising America's scientific enterprise for a post-war order. Bush's answer, a report entitled "Science: The Endless Frontier", became the blueprint for American government support of basic science. In turn this led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that supports fundamental research, and shaped the triumphal attitude to science and technology that defined so much of the "American Century".

The belief that government should support basic research, that this research can be a foundation of national prosperity and that America can organise its scientific institutions to facilitate that process, remains as true today as when Bush laid out that schema. But I believe Bush would be the first to recognise that the world in which science is conducted has changed dramatically since 1945, leaving the American research system in need of an update.

Bush wrote his report to Roosevelt at an exceptional moment. America stood on the cusp of final victory in the largest conflict in human history. The countries of Europe, the previous century's scientific powers, lay mostly devastated. This structural reality produced the heights of American manufacturing power. Similarly, it explains part of Bush's success in continuing wartime organised science in peacetime. In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower described the cold-war culmination of Bush's initiative. Eisenhower observed that "research has become central" and "more formalized, complex, and costly", as "task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields" displaced the "solitary inventor". Mass industrial science soon mobilised government, corporations and academia to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon.

That post-war industrial America no longer exists. And the dreams of an open world that followed the cold war have given way to a competitive global environment, in which Chinese technical capacity, not Soviet science, seeks to overtake America in a race for scientific and technological leadership.

There are reasons besides the procession of history to think the "Endless Frontier" is out of date. In recent decades American scientific enterprise has shown its age, with diminishing returns.

Despite biomedical research budgets soaring since the 1990s, the rate of significant breakthroughs has slowed and drug approvals have plateaued. Many scientists spend nearly half their time on paperwork. The system serves itself better than its scientists.

Bush's managerialism promoted what was later termed the "linear model" of scientific development, in which government funds basic research in universities, and industry turns newly published insights into novel applications. This made sense when government was the primary administrator of fundamental science. But these days an increasing number of scientists do their research in industry, and industry funds an increasing amount of basic science. Over the past two decades the share of private funding dedicated to fundamental research has grown five-fold. Industry self-funds more basic research, to the tune of $37.4bn a year, than the government funds at universities. The 2024 Nobel chemistry prize, for a breakthrough in protein-folding, was largely achieved through industry resources and talent.

Moreover, artificial intelligence is creating new conditions to which research institutions must adapt. AI has the potential to be the greatest accelerator of scientific progress in human history, if we match its capacities with a suitable research ecosystem. The longer we delay adjustments, the more likely it is that legacy organisational structures built to Bush's blueprint will be overwhelmed. As the world changes, and the challenges of American leadership change with it, the effort to organise the national research system must move on from 20th-century managerialism.

To respond to these new realities, government is refocusing its efforts to meet America's best scientists where and when they do their best work. We should adopt a portfolio approach to funding that includes both fast, exploratory grants and longer-term support, matching the timeline to the researcher's work. We should use the full toolkit of funding mechanisms, including prize challenges and binding commitments to create markets for innovative products. We should experiment with review processes that promote disruptive proposals, and fund new institutional models such as X-Labs, the NSF's initiative to launch and scale new organisations to address technical challenges that university and industry labs cannot easily solve through traditional methods.

Beyond all this, we should back early-career independence by expanding portable graduate fellowships and four-year PhD programmes. We should subject our work to the scrutiny of metascience, the scientific study of how we do science, including building metascience units in funding agencies. And we should coordinate national efforts, in the spirit of the Apollo programme, and prepare the scientific ecosystem for the AI era. To this end, last November President Donald Trump launched the Genesis Mission via executive order.

Homage to Vannevar

Making the case for this transformation, last month I published my own report to the president on the shape of the American science enterprise, "Science: A New Golden Age". It is a sequel and an homage to Bush's Endless Frontier, but also aims to be a successor. The moment calls for renewal of his original intentions, recapturing his ambition and optimism, while recognising the new context in which we find ourselves. ■

Michael Kratsios is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

17

Briefing Afghanistan

img-34.jpeg

Peace, poverty and repression

HERAT, KANDAHAR AND KABUL

Afghanistan is a much safer place than it has been for half a century. But its people are suffering and increasingly isolated

THE CAFÉS on foreign-ministry road in the heart of Kabul's government district used to blare out Afghan pop to attract a gossipy crowd of civil servants. No music comes from them now—or from anywhere else. It is banned. Men bustle along the street in traditional shalwar kameez, sporting long beards. Where a colourful mural used to be there is now a giant slogan in Dari, the local dialect of Persian: "There is no god but Allah". Next to it a man in black fatigues lounges in the turret of a captured American Humvee, fondling a machinegun and keeping a lazy eye on the lunchtime traffic.

On August 15th it will be five years since the Taliban swept back into Kabul. For 20 years they had been fighting against the government, its American backers and some of America's allies. The war began in 2001, when America toppled the Taliban's first government because it had provided sanctuary to the terrorists who planned the attacks of September 11th. By the time it

ended in 2021 it had become the longest America has ever waged. The regime America had backed collapsed like a house of cards as the superpower turned tail. The Taliban returned with a free hand.

Travelling from Herat, in the west of the country, to Kandahar, in the south, and on to Kabul in the east shows how they have secured their grip. On the 1,000km trip your correspondent saw the black-and-white Taliban flag flying in town squares and in fields of wheat, at roundabouts and remote checkpoints, on the desks of university professors and in the boardrooms of CEOs.

Tired of war, Afghans have welcomed peace. Cities which used to ring to the blasts of suicide-bombers feel surprisingly calm. "This is the second summer that birds have returned to Kabul," says a former government official, pointing up to the trees in his garden.

The observation suggests that wildlife is more easily reconciled to the new situation

tion than international opinion. Though various countries have embassies in Kabul, only one foreign government—Russia's—recognises the Islamic Emirate. The Taliban control ministries, taxes, borders and the army, but are shut out of the global financial system because many cabinet members remain under sanction as terrorists. Their grotesque ban on education for girls over 12 cements their outcast status.

The Taliban have established a reasonably stable peace and are running a modern state much better than they did in the 1990s. Then their leaders knew little of life beyond their Pashtun villages in the south of the country. Now many have seen the wider world, in particular the Gulf states where many spent time during the war.

But they have no way to court investment. And both economic and military power is increasingly being consolidated around Haibatullah Akhundzada, the emir, who governs not from comparatively cosmopolitan Kabul but from the Pashtun city

18 Briefing Afghanistan

► of Kandahar. He is, even by Taliban standards, extraordinarily extreme.

Stability after decades of war is not nothing. But Mr Akhundzada's government does not offer the country's fast-growing population of 45m—almost two-thirds of whom were not yet born in 2001—anything that remotely resembles a path to prosperity. Many of them find their lives getting worse in material terms. All of them—especially the women—have had freedoms curtailed (people inside the country mostly spoke to The Economist only on condition of anonymity). They constantly weigh small freedoms against the risk of punishment.

The Taliban government has some resources. It has preserved much of Kabul's professionalised bureaucracy along with the computer systems that deal with taxation, borders and customs (though in June the emir banned the use of smartphones in government offices). Some officials chose to flee. But there was no great purge; more than half the republic's civil servants remain, according to people in and around the government. Continuity of expertise helped the central bank to preserve the strength of the Afghani and keep inflation under control.

You have no power here!

The government now takes in around $4bn in taxes and other revenues each year, according to the World Bank, almost 60% more than in 2020. The increase came from raising duties and cutting graft. In its latter years the previous government had become so corrupt that it 'rotted from the inside', says a minister who was part of it and who still lives in Kabul. Afghans say that the low-level extortion which was then a part of daily life is now largely gone.

The growth in revenues, though, is smaller than the fall in aid. Humanitarian and development aid ran at around $4bn in 2020. When the Taliban took power, aid to the government cratered, but much of the harm was offset by an increase in humanitarian assistance through other channels. That has now been cut too. In 2025 it was just $1.2bn; this year's figure will be lower, probably a lot lower. The country's hospitals and clinics are thus being defunded, as the government has cut money for health and welfare in order to spend fully half of its revenue on security.

Five years in, Taliban ministers reportedly say in private that they remain 'in a control situation', which means security is paramount. They have got results. Last year fewer than 100 civilians were killed in terrorist attacks, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which collects such data (see chart). The government has clamped down on the once fearsome Islamic State Khorasan Province. Al-Qaeda has wound down its operations in the

Spot the departure date

Afghanistan, recorded deaths in terrorist attacks*, '000

img-35.jpeg

country. In July opposition groups mounted a string of attacks and claimed to have killed more than 20 Taliban fighters. Such resistance might grow. But the attacks were small and easily quelled.

There has been one significant exception to the crackdown on terrorist groups—at least, so the Pakistani government says. A group with a presence in Afghanistan called the Pakistani Taliban carries out attacks in Pakistan. Pakistan accuses the Taliban government of sheltering the group, and its air force has struck targets inside Afghanistan. Pakistan has also closed the border between the two countries. That has raised food prices in Afghanistan and closed off access to export markets and medical treatment.

In reducing Afghanistan's violence, the Taliban have one huge advantage: they do not have to fight the Taliban, who used to perpetrate most of it. This irony does not undercut the benefit to the general public. Afghans are quick to say what a difference peace has made: farmers can get their goods to market; boys (and, when allowed, girls) can walk to school; taking long drives to visit family or see the country are

no longer an aberrant choice.

There is, though, a price paid through repression. The security forces respond brutally to any open dissent. In a recent visit to Herat, which has large Tajik and Shia Muslim populations, a government minister singled out the police there as an example to others, according to two locals briefed on the discussion. The exemplary work he was praising was the suppression of a protest in June by women angry at a crackdown by the vice-and-virtue police. Many protesters were beaten. One teenager was shot dead.

What the government does not spend on men with machineguns appears to go on motorways and mosques. Major cities are still, for the most part, linked by two-lane, occasionally rocky roads. But on the drive from Kandahar to Kabul you will enjoy bursts of freshly laid asphalt. Mosques are being built every 70km or so, by decree.

In Kabul roads are being widened, and private residential construction is rising, much of it financed by the diaspora for relatives who remain. Elsewhere the government is investing in canals, gas pipelines and solar parks, and handing out licences for mining gold, copper and lithium, mostly in the north of the country. Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs, says the Taliban's vision is to turn Afghanistan into a 'space of positive competition'. If peace holds, he and his colleagues argue, surely Afghanistan will begin to prosper.

Behind the moon, beyond the rain

If so, it has a very long way to go. The country's GDP per person fell sharply after the Taliban came to power. At purchasing-power parity it is now just $2,300, roughly what it was in the mid-2000s. Only a handful of mostly conflict-ridden countries in sub-Saharan Africa are worse off. Many Afghans are hungry. Prolonged drought makes food scarce; there are long queues at wells in Kabul. 'Lots of children we encounter are living on bread and tea,' says one of the reduced band of aid workers.

In Sarobi, a mud-brick town set among scattered villages in the mountains east of Kabul, locals say that they have only just enough food. A lot of people are getting into debt to survive. 'We have peace, but our pockets are empty,' says Razi Khan, a village elder. For many households the most pressing problem is a lack of work. Hassan, a 25-year-old who was a soldier in the previous government's army, has been looking for a job since the Taliban returned to power. What jobs there are—like labouring on a local solar project—require vetting by a Taliban commander, he adds.

These problems have been worsened by the forced return of some 6m Afghans, many penniless, from Pakistan and Iran. 'It has put severe strain on the resources of ►

img-36.jpeg

Briefing Afghanistan 19

► a country that was already close to the edge,” says Arafat Jamal of UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Most of those pushed out by Iran hail from poor villages in the north of Afghanistan, which for years have survived on seasonal fruit-picking work across the border.

Though many Afghans have grown inured to conditions of poverty and hardship, there is one topic about which they express bitter disappointment: education. Between 2001 and 2021 school enrolment rose, particularly in cities. It was far from universal—the current literacy rate is just 37%—but parents had begun to see boys and girls going to school as the norm.

The Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary education is thus opposed by the vast majority of Afghans—and by most Talibs, according to a lot of people The Economist talked to. There is nothing most of them can do about it. But the authorities in some cities have created a workaround for some of the better-off by issuing licences for madrasas, or religious schools, to educate girls over 12 as well as boys.

In a converted three-storey house in Kabul with small, ramshackle classrooms and moth-eaten carpets, the principal of one such institution says he is educating 600 girls. The standard fee is 1,000 Afghans ($15.20) a month (some poorer families pay less), for which the girls get four hours of teaching by female teachers six days a week. The girls wear black abayas and purple headscarves. The four 16- and 17-year-olds who told your correspondent how happy they were to be back in school did so through covid-style masks, because women’s mouths must be covered.

Technically, the whole enterprise is above board. Still, everyone speaks in hushed tones, as if talking about it—in particular the fact that it is not a strictly Islamic

education—might make it vanish. The girls say that the school is better than the public ones they went to before 2021. They are pleased that they get to study maths, science, geography and English (which they all speak well) as well as Islamic studies, which they enjoy.

Because of the horrible things he does One, Diwa, says she is sorry many of her friends cannot afford to attend. They all say they are frustrated that they will not be allowed to make much of the precarious education they are getting. “We don’t want to just sit at home and raise children, or be a teacher in an Islamic school,” says Nadia. “That was not our dream.”

The chief canceller of dreams is the man in Kandahar whom some diplomats in Kabul call the Wizard of Oz. Mr Akhundzada, who is thought to be around 60, does not, as far as is known, stay hidden behind a curtain, but he is very rarely seen in public; the most recent verified photos of him were taken decades ago. A former cleric and sharia judge, during the war he championed the Taliban’s shift towards suicide-bombing, allowing one of his sons thus to murder people in 2017.

Mr Akhundzada has imposed a version of sharia law that vanishingly few other Muslims would seek to justify, one which includes strict sex segregation, strong dress codes and the erasure of women from public life. His broadcast speeches make clear that he sees women’s rights, and non-religious education for anyone, as the work of Satan. “He thinks the outside world is essentially poisoned, and is taking Afghans away from the path of sharia and God,” says a diplomatic source in Kabul. “His view is basically ‘switch it off’.” Adam Weinstein of the Quincy Institute, a think-tank, argues that the Kandahari faction

may believe that more aid and foreign investment would only strengthen the influence of its rivals. Harsh decrees and isolation, on the other hand, help make clear, and thus maintain, the emir’s iron grip.

They are not the only tools to that end. The emir has made sure that ministers in Kabul have deputies who report to him. He directs the white-robed vice-and-virtue police, the regime’s primary mechanism of social and institutional control. Bypassing the finance ministry in Kabul, he has established control over some revenues from mining. And in the past six months, arguing that tensions with Pakistan require it, he has built up a force of 8,000 fighters in Kandahar that sits outside the army’s chain of command and has a strong whiff of the praetorian about it.

There were sincere hopes that the return would not go Mr Akhundzada’s way. Many of the moderate Talibs now based in Kabul believed that the second emirate could emulate the shining examples of Islamic modernisation they had seen in the Gulf without sacrificing their beliefs. For a time there were rumours that less reactionary figures—notably Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister and leader of a powerful faction—would challenge the emir. Now unhappy Talibs have closed ranks, perhaps unsure that they can win, perhaps because whatever concerns they have come second to remaining in power.

There is thus no obvious alternative to more regressive policies and further isolation. The state of health care shows what that costs. The Taliban have insisted on segregating male and female patients and doctors, have pushed female doctors out and have prevented women from undertaking medical training. The result has been predictable: a chronic lack of care for women. A survey by Refugees International, a charity, found that maternal mortality in Herat in the first half of 2026 was five times higher than in the same period the year before.

Another indicator is emigration. A professor whose entire faculty has been cleared of women (and whose educated wife is unable to work) says that regressive policies have already caused a huge brain drain. Unless they change, that draining will speed up. “We have stayed, hoping things would get better, but soon we will start trying to leave,” says the professor. Though Iran has turned hostile towards Afghan migrants, many Afghans are still attempting to escape across the Margo desert. Marg is the Persian word for death, and the landscape meets its billing.

But if some leave, most have no choice but to stay. Some Talibs still insist that things will ease up in time. But many Afghans feel impatient. “It has been five years,” says Diwa, the student. “We don’t want to wait.” ■

img-37.jpeg

Why oh why can’t I?

Term-time

working.

Amazon employees can take time off during the school holidays.

amazon

Ten weeks off guaranteed per year. Mix of paid holiday and unpaid time off. Conditions apply.

21

Britain

img-38.jpeg

Politics and business

Labour's love lost

The Labour government fell out badly with business but has a chance to start again under Andy Burnham

THE MOST unlikely love affair in British politics recently was between big business and the Labour Party. Before the general election in 2024, the party launched what this newspaper called a "smoked-salmon offensive" to reassure bosses that it had sworn off socialism and would govern with economic growth as its "number-one mission". It held long, detailed talks with different sectors, asking for ideas on how to boost growth.

The plan worked. Fed up with the feckless Conservatives and charmed by Sir Keir Starmer, the party leader, and Rachel Reeves, his chancellor-to-be, firms swooned over Labour. But it did not last. The salmon sandwiches went first stale, then mouldy. By the time Sir Keir and Ms Reeves left office this July, most business leaders, from FTSE 100 CEOS to scrappy startup founders, were sick of them.

The government stopped listening to business, whacked it with hefty taxes and

failed to implement many of the pro-growth reforms it had promised. Engagement with firms, previously undertaken by Ms Reeves herself, was outsourced to civil servants. Ministers at the Treasury and other economic departments continued to hold frequent meetings with bosses, but attendees say these were more "photo opportunities" than substantive discussions.

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

  • 22 Business's missing voice
  • 23 Accents and power
  • 23 Releasing prisoners early
  • 24 Getting Scots off drugs
  • 24 Scotlands's guga politics
  • 26 Artisan cheesemakers
  • — Bagehot is away

The party's boosterish tone quickly became discordant. Weeks after the election, Sir Keir shocked international investors with a speech in the garden of 10 Downing Street in which he moaned that "things will get worse before they get better." Labour's first budget imposed big tax rises on businesses, most painfully an increase in the national-insurance contributions paid by employers, a payroll tax. Even those who did not take too much of a direct hit were disturbed by the seesaw decision-making the announcement epitomised.

Business and consumer confidence continued to plunge. Promises to cut red tape and reduce the price of energy for businesses came to little, although Sir Keir made a start on reforming planning rules and financial-services regulation.

His departure offers the chance of a fresh start, business leaders hope. Unfortunately for them, the former prime minister and chancellor were not solely to blame for Labour's shaky relationship with the corporate world. Pro-business feeling is rare within the party: just 6% of its MPs came to the House of Commons from commerce or finance (compared with 31% for Conservative MPs), whereas 11% worked for a trade union and 39% had another political job before entering Parliament (see chart on next page). Not a single member of the new cabinet has had a significant

22 Britain

► business career. Tory cabinets between 2010 and 2024 were usually stuffed with businesspeople, including the six chancellors who came before Ms Reeves.

Party bigwigs would visit factories and building sites—with big industrial workforces—but seemed less comfortable with the services-based firms likely to drive growth. The pro-business minority within the party complain that colleagues default to a “corporatist” approach redolent of the old economy. A former Labour staffer describes a “spiritual gap” between the party and business. A corporate boss grumbles that “‘unions good, businesses bad’ is an article of faith that a lot of them haven’t thought about.” The lack of understanding goes both ways: business leaders often misunderstand politics (see box).

Mr Burnham’s record as mayor of Greater Manchester suggests he understands the importance of close collaboration with business. Mark Allan, the CEO of LandSec, a property developer, praises his approach of encouraging the private sector to plough money into Manchester city centre while using public funds to invest in the shabbier towns around its edge. The prime minister sees his political identity as “business-friendly old Labour”, an aide says.

His rhetoric is less promising. Mr Burnham fulminates against “neoliberalism” and privatisation, and gives little indication that he understands that the profit motive can drive benefits to society at large. His early interventions have been aimed at lowering the cost of living for households via price caps or tax tweaks, not supply-side reforms to make it cheaper to produce goods and services.

In the two speeches he has made since becoming prime minister he has not mentioned “growth” or “business” (Sir Keir gave a speech on his first full day in Num-

ber 10 which mentioned “growth” four times). The prime minister seems to be getting on fine with the leaders of America and the EU, but has had almost nothing to say about trade policy. Miles Celic, head of TheCityUK, an industry lobby group, warns that “Burnham really needs to set out what he stands for in terms of attracting international investment.” The prime minister is in talks to hire Jim O’Neill, a former banker and Conservative minister, to a job in Downing Street, but the Times reports that this may be derailed by a disagreement over wealth taxes.

Watch what I do, not what I say

Business is not a monolith. Startups are frustrated by bureaucracy but blame the civil service rather than ministers. Banks are quietly pleased by their treatment under Labour. Pubs and restaurants are engaged by their tax burden—but optimistic that they will be top of Mr Burnham’s list of companies to placate, given their role in

perking up high streets, one of his avowed goals (indeed, pubs have already been promised a lower business-rates bill).

Many are nervous about Mr Burnham’s plans. If he acts on his rhetoric, business is in for a battering. But there are reasons for hope. The handful of Labour officials whom business trusted as a conduit to Number 10 have all been kept on. Jonathan Reynolds, back as business secretary after being shuffled out last year, is respected by those who have dealt with him, as is the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan. Both sit within a souped-up business and trade department which has absorbed the previously separate science and technology brief. Tech firms are unhappy about this change, but putting all the biggest levers of growth under one roof could help countermand the overbearing power of the Treasury.

Sir Keir spoke in ways that business loved, then often enacted policies it hated. Mr Burnham has the chance to do the inverse: talk populist, act centrist. ■

Business lobbying

Time to speak up

British business has failed to make its voice heard

BUSINESS LEADERS can be naive when it comes to politics. It was a mistake for them to cheerlead for Labour before the most recent general election without thinking through the impact of the party’s policies. For example, they seemed to assume that the Employment Rights Act, which gives workers much more protection against their bosses, would be heavily watered down despite its importance to Labour MPs and the trade unions. In talks on the details of the new law, representatives of the government and unions were shocked at business groups’ poor negotiating skill.

Bosses are often afraid to engage in politics, beyond contributing bland quotes to government press releases. Public-affairs experts speak with frustration about how hard it is to persuade high-profile leaders to talk about policies that would help their firms, for fear of looking silly if they do not get what they want. The few who do speak out—such as Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy, or Tim Martin of J D Wetherspoon, a chain of pubs—can be resented by their peers.

Voters generally believe that if taxes do need to go up, it is fine to noble business (though they are even keener on whacking the rich). Firms have work to

do to explain to politicians why that will end up making the public poorer, by raising prices and curbing growth.

It is now time, most bosses believe, to put on a brave face and make nice with Andy Burnham’s new team. Firms are anxious to avoid being cut out as they were under Sir Keir Starmer (see previous story). The government should be “working with business from the start, not after decisions have been made”, according to Lena Levy of the British Chambers of Commerce, a lobby group. They are also crying out for the stability that the last lot promised but did not provide: barely a year into his government, Sir Keir replaced the business secretary, City minister and AI minister as part of a largely unnecessary reshuffle.

And businesses are desperate to avoid any further tax raids at the budget which the new chancellor, John Healey, will deliver in October. Even his fellow ministers admit they have no way of knowing how he will pay for an expected bump in defence spending. If the government keeps on avoiding broad-based tax rises while dodging serious spending cuts, businesses will fear a fiscal flogging that will keep animal spirits restrained. Speaking out more boldly could help reduce that risk.

Background check

Britain, MPs’ occupations before entering Parliament, 2024

img-39.jpeg

*Physicians, dentists, architects, surveyors and engineers Source: “The British General Election of 2024”, by R. Ford et al.

Britain 23

Less-posit politics

Accents and power

“Generic northern” has made it. Generic Essex still has a way to go

WATCH A VIDEO of Andy Burnham’s remarks after being appointed prime minister, turn the automatic transcript on, and you might be in for a surprise: “I have just returned from Bookingham Palace,” reads one. It is a seminal moment: none of his predecessors in the age of recording has pronounced “Buckingham” in a way a transcriber would render as “Bookingham”. He is also the first to rhyme words like “class” with “gas”. In short, he sounds like a northerner, much more so than anyone who has taken office at Number 10 Downing Street, says Geoff Lindsey of University College London.

Millions of Britons talk like Mr Burnham. Raised near Liverpool, later moving to Manchester, he is often seen as a pleaser, but it is impossible to please everyone, especially in two rival cities. In 2016 he told Rob Drummond, a linguist at Manchester Metropolitan University, that he was accused of playing up Scouse sounds in Liverpool and Manc vowels in Manchester. He calls his own accent “generic northern”.

Not every prime minister has spoken with perfect Received Pronunciation (RP), even setting aside the Scottish and Welsh ones. Jim Callaghan’s “r”s in words like “worst” and “work” were a giveaway: he came from Portsmouth, near the south-western part of England where “r”s are sometimes pronounced after vowels. Harold Wilson’s Yorkshire roots were also reflected in his accent, though he was less easy to instantly peg as a northerner than Mr Burnham. Two more recent prime ministers, Sir Tony Blair and Liz Truss, grew up in the north but didn’t sound like it.

Things were different in the 19th century. Robert Peel, prime minister in the 1830s and 1840s, was known for a Lancashire accent. William Gladstone, born in Liverpool to Scottish parents, was said to have a north-western accent, too—though it is hardly apparent in the formal greeting to Thomas Edison in the first recording of a British prime minister. But by the mid-20th century, a cut-glass RP held away from Oxbridge to the BBC and Westminster.

That mid-century accent now sounds almost comical, disappearing swiftly as the 1960s made working-class and regional accents cooler in the wider culture. But things changed more slowly in politics. Labour in particular began to flaunt its MPs with working-class, regional accents. But none of them made it to Number 10.

Room continues to open up slowly for a Westminster that sounds like the country. Jo Platt, an MP for Leigh and Atherton near Manchester, grew up in Salford. As a marketing trainee in the 1980s, she changed her accent to avoid the mockery she saw visited on others; when she would call friends after leaving work they would say “Why are you speaking like that?” She has since embraced her old accent, and kicked off a recent parliamentary debate on the topic. (A Northern Irish MP shared tales of Hansard staff chasing him to ask what he had said for the official record.)

Dr Drummond and Amanda Cole of Cambridge have begun a research project to find out more about accents in Westminster. Dr Cole hails from Essex, and her research—using her own voice—has found that people rate an Essex-accented speaker as 11% less intelligent than RP speakers. “I don’t think we’re at a point in this country yet where we could have a prime minister with an Essex accent,” she says. ■

Releasing prisoners early

Crime and punishment

The parlous state of Britain’s prisons is a first serious test for the prime minister

ANDREW HARPER, a 28-year-old police constable (PC), had been married for just four weeks when he was killed in the line of duty in 2019. Attempting to prevent three teenagers from stealing a quad bike in Berkshire, he was caught by a tow-rope and dragged at ferocious speed by the perpetrators’ getaway car. The ghastly crime shocked the country and the culprits were convicted of manslaughter in 2020.

Two of those men are now among 5,000 prisoners eligible for early release under the government’s latest scheme to prevent the prison system from “collapsing”. Andy

Burnham, the prime minister, had said that he could not find a way to keep the killers—and all those convicted of manslaughter—behind bars without the prison system reaching capacity. That was before 1m people signed a petition signalling their outrage. On August 11th Mr Burnham relented: he was “increasingly confident” that the notorious killers would remain imprisoned. The crisis is a test of Mr Burnham’s ability to make hard decisions.

Weeks after taking power in 2024 the Labour government implemented an emergency early-release scheme as prisons were 99% full, prompting allegations that it was soft on crime. The latest scheme is even more controversial: from October 1st criminals imprisoned for less serious offences will be released after serving 33% rather than 40-50% of their sentence behind bars, while those convicted of more serious offences—including manslaughter—will be eligible for parole after serving 50% rather than 66% of their sentence.

Although the early-release schemes colour public perceptions, in practice the justice system has over time become more severe. For most crimes, the share of convictions that result in immediate custodial sentences and the average length of those sentences have risen since 2010 (see chart). Meanwhile, prison capacity is no bigger now than it was in 2012.

The government has needed early-release arrangements to prevent prisons from overflowing. The Ministry of Justice expects the prison population to rise from 85,600 today—equivalent to 97% of capacity—to 96,000 by 2032. The government is spending £5bn ($6.8m) on building an additional 14,000 places by 2031, but the country is predicted to run out of cell space again next year.

Britain has the highest incarceration rate in western Europe, but nearly two-thirds of the 90,000 people who were given an immediate custodial sentence last year were imprisoned for a year or less. There is plenty of evidence that prison does this group of offenders little good, instead encouraging them into a life of crime. Around two-thirds of them will reoffend.

In response to PC Harper’s death, Parliament changed the law in 2022 to hand down mandatory life sentences for those who kill emergency workers while committing a crime. But “Harper’s law” cannot apply retroactively. Mr Burnham wants to explore three options to free up more prison cells to keep offenders such as PC Harper’s killers under lock and key: speed up the deportation of 10,000 foreign prisoners; release some of the 2,300 people detained indefinitely; and empty some women’s prisons and repurpose them for men.

All these schemes will be fraught with difficulty. Yet Mr Burnham is clearly desperate to keep the public onside. ■

Locked up longer

England and Wales, average length of custodial sentence, years

● 2010 ● 2025

All indictable offences

Sexual offences

Robbery

Drug offences

Fraud

Violence against the person

Theft

Source: Ministry of Justice

img-40.jpeg

24 Britain

Scotland's drugs disaster

Staying alive

GLASGOW

Drugs are getting deadlier. Efforts to get Scots off them need to be stepped up

FOR FOUR days David Rowat lay dying in his flat in East Kilbride. "Every rock bottom is a trap door," says the former heroin addict. "You need to be in the darkest, lowest place to want change." When his daughter discovered him in 2021, only a few hours of oxygen remained in his blood.

Five years ago Scotland sought to end its reputation as the drug-death capital of Europe (see chart). Yet after spending an extra £250m ($336m), it wears that crown for the seventh year in a row. And although its 1,017 drug-misuse deaths in 2024 was the lowest tally since 2017, last year the number rose again, by about 8%.

Some critics think Scotland puts too much weight on "harm reduction"—managing rather than curing addicts. "We have built a system that is very good at keeping people alive inside addiction, but not nearly good enough at helping them leave it," argues Annemarie Ward of Faces & Voices of Recovery UK, a charity. But harm reduction remains essential. Police carry naloxone to prevent overdoses in the street. Last year Glasgow opened Britain's first drug-consumption room (DCR) for a three-year pilot: addicts can take drugs under medical supervision. It has prevented about 200 overdose deaths. Patients can also get blood tests, hot showers and referrals to health and other services.

Around 200 such sites exist worldwide; Edinburgh has plans to build some. Steve Rolles, a drug-policy analyst, says that Scotland needs dozens of DCRs, and cheaper mobile ones too. "It's a false economy to think you're saving money by not investing in it today."

In America's shadow

Drug-related deaths per million people aged 15-64

img-41.jpeg

*All ages, age-adjusted †Estimate Sources: CDC; EMCDDA; National Records Scotland; ONS

Roughly 44,000 Scots have an opioid dependence. Glasgow, where the death rate is highest, has just 23 publicly funded beds for rehab. Burnt-out staff prioritise emergency cases and short-term targets.

Relapse is common. Ross McKenzie, a small-business owner, had to go to Italy to get clean. Four years of free recovery in a rural commune rid him of a heroin addiction, whereas brief stints at a pricey detox centre in Aberdeen left him to relapse twice. "It got the drugs out of my system," he says, "but the time was nowhere near enough to actually start healing."

Part of the solution is giving Scots alternatives to pills and needles. Schools have started to invest in leisure facilities. Poverty makes the job harder: the poorest Scots are much more likely to die of substance abuse. And drugs have become easier to acquire. You no longer have to wait on a street corner, confides one ex-addict, for a dealer to appear. Users of social media can order chemical highs to their door.

Chemicals are deadlier, too. Scots are mixing cocktails of different drugs. The rise of drugs laced with nitazenes is alarming. The synthetic opioids, up to 500 times more potent than fentanyl, have been detected in benzodiazepine pills ("benzos") which sell for as little as 50 pence each. Last year police discovered Britain's first nitazene lab in west Scotland.

So what else might help? "I've never seen anything that works like a recovery café," says Mr Rowat, who now volunteers at one in Glasgow. He has been clean for three years and is looking for paid work. Regular meetings with recovered addicts, and a strict programme of abstinence, helped restore his hope and health.

Every week thousands of Scots visit such centres. But more need to, and funding for long-term care is limited. Drug harm costs Scotland around £6bn a year. Investing in the infrastructure for addicts to get clean would be economical as well as compassionate. ■

Traditionalists v conservationists

The guga divide

EDINBURGH

A ban on an ancient hunt exposes a tension in Scottish nationalism

ALMOST EVERY summer since 1549, a group of men from the Isle of Lewis has sailed to an uninhabited islet in the North Atlantic to hunt baby birds. The gugas (Gaelic for gannet chicks) were slain with a club before being gutted, salted and preserved in brine to be eaten year-round as a local delicacy.

Yet this year's hunt won't go ahead. The Scottish National Party's natural-heritage body refused to grant it permission. NatureScot cited a study showing that the hunt could dramatically harm the islet's population of gannets. Opponents, including the local Labour MP, say the outcome was "reverse engineered" to appease animal-rights activists.

The move exposes a divide within Scottish nationalism. It wants to protect cultural heritage from the British state, but it also seeks to dismantle bits—like the guga hunt—that are out of touch with its progressive sensibility.

This tension is not new. In January 2025 the country's exam board removed Robert Burns as a stand-alone author for students in their penultimate year of secondary education to make way for more "diverse works". Later that year the SNP drove through legislation that could force historic Scottish families to split up their great estates to water down highly

concentrated land ownership.

Scotland's nationalist movement has never been organised solely around culture (in the way that those in Wales and Catalonia coalesce around protecting native tongues). It has a leftist edge—in defiance of England's perceived conservatism. And its leftists have no desire to defend the murder of baby birds, even if it's a treasured tradition.

img-42.jpeg

Goo goo guga

IDIRA®

Introducing Idira

The next-generation platform that secures every identity for the AI enterprise.

Discover Identity Risk

Use AI to identify and instantly remediate risk by continuously discovering every identity, entitlement, and access path.

Control Every Privilege

Move from static access to dynamic controls by applying zero standing privilege and just-in-time enforcement to every identity.

Automate Governance

Apply AI-powered policy to transform compliance into governance by automating the entire identity lifecycle.

EXPLORE IDIRA

img-43.jpeg

paloalto® NETWORKS

26 Britain

An artisan revival

Say cheese!

NETTLEBED

With more cheeses than France, British cheesemakers ponder the whey ahead

THE BLUE-MOULD crisis struck the Nettlebed Creamery days before Christmas in 2019. When Diane Honey came into the storeroom, the peachy rinds of the Highmoor cheeses were speckled with grey. Penicillium commune was greedily consuming the whole production at the busiest time of year. Though harmless to eat, they could no longer be sold. "It wasn't aesthetically pleasing," says Ms Honey. The cheeses went to a food bank.

Such are the trials of the artisans bringing British cheesemaking back from the brink. "We don't have an institute of cheese, as in France, to learn our craft," says Rose Grimond, the Nettlebed Creamery's founder (who once worked for The Economist). "So we make our own mistakes—often expensive ones."

For centuries British farmhouses turned leftover milk into nutritious, non-perishable cheese. Each era left its mould. The Romans used dry cheeses as soldier-food. Monks perfected delicate washed-rind varieties. And generations of farmers honed styles such as buttery Lancashires and crumbly Wensleydales.

But wartime milk-rationing consolidated a lot of local production, and wiped out the ecosystem of specialist schools. Over the two world wars, the number of farmhouse cheesemakers dropped from roughly 3,500 to around 100. Industrialisation whittled that down to just 62 in the late 1970s, according to Patrick Rance's "The Great British Cheese Book", published in 1982. When artisans began reviving old recipes in the 1980s, they were, in effect, reinventing the wheel.

They have done so with gusto. An extra impetus came with the abolition of the Milk Marketing Board in 1994. That ended guaranteed prices for milk and gave dairy farmers an incentive to find higher-value uses for surplus output.

Matthew O'Callaghan, who organises the Artisan Cheese Fair, Britain's largest, reckons that the number of British cheese varieties has risen to around 1,400—well over double the total in France, by some counts—and more than 300 cheesemakers. "You could have a different British cheese from a different cheesemaker every day of the year," he says.

As more consumers want cheeses with a clear provenance, often linked with a nice craft story and better farming practices, sales of speciality brands have been out-

outgrowing the general market, according to IMARC, a research firm. The reputation of British cheeses is rising. At last year's World Cheese Awards, three of 14 finalists were British: two Red Leicesters and an ash-coated soft goat's cheese.

It helps that, with fewer cheeses subject to Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) laws, and less pressure than in France to produce particular varieties in certain regions, British cheesemakers have more freedom to innovate. Sparkenhoe Farm's Red Leicester is made according to a recipe from the 1700s. In Somerset, Feltham's Farm makes "Renegade Monk" by mashing up blue cultures with a distinctly British ale-washed rind. In Suffolk, Fen Farm Dairy ladles curds by hand to make a Brielike cheese called Baron Bigod, using an ancient method that is now becoming less common even in France.

Joe Schneider, an American cheesemaker, moved to Nottinghamshire to make "Stichelton". The blue cheese resembles a Stilton but uses raw milk—prohibited for "Stiltons" under the European Union's PDO laws, which still apply in Britain—to avoid losing the distinct flavours of his farm to pasteurisation. He says that what drew him to British cheeses was their "relationship with where it was coming from, who was the person behind it". "The affineurs in France don't want you to know where they get their cheese," he says.

The next chapter may be harder. Pro-

Producers are now in a difficult spot, says Bronwen Percival, a buyer at Neal's Yard Dairy, a cheese shop that championed the revival. Raw-material and energy costs have risen. And the emergence of new pathogens has "put fear into raw-milk cheesemakers", of whom there are fewer now than a decade ago, she says.

Some cheesemakers hope to take a slice of foreign markets. Exports of British cheese (both artisan and mass-made) rose from £818m in 2023 to £971m ($1.3bn) in 2025, an increase of 12% in real terms. Western Europeans, who are used to paying a premium for good cheese, have long been the best buyers (Neal's Yard sold more Stilton to France than in Britain before Brexit), but Canada and China have been buying more. Cheddar has long been the foreign favourite, accounting for 60% of export value; fresher cheeses, which are more delicate and have a shorter sell-by date, lend themselves less to shipping.

Creaming it

At home, more British customers might be encouraged to buy cheese as a treat. Younger people seem to have a growing taste for it. The Real Cheese Project, a lobby group, finds that 35% of consumers aged 25 to 34 buy artisan cheese once a week, compared with 17% in the general population.

Cheese tourism seems to be a growing part of the marketing mix. For serious foodies Cheese Journeys, a travel company based in America, offers a week-long "British Cheese Odyssey" from $6,200 (£4,600). Back in Nettlebed on a summer Sunday, families tuck into cheese toasties in a converted barn called The Cheese Shed. The farm shop draws lunching cyclists and horse riders in the Chilterns. Visitors peer into the glass-walled creamery. "It's like a cheese-zoo enclosure," says Ms Grimond cheerfully. ■

img-44.jpeg

Impressive shelf life

27

Europe

img-45.jpeg

Public health

Not beating the spread

Sexually transmitted infections have surged in Europe since the pandemic

TRACKING SEXUALLY transmitted infections (STIs) is not easy. Many who carry them show no symptoms. Testing is patchy. And risky behaviour tends to go unnoticed, since sex (thankfully) is usually performed in private. But public-health authorities do their best, and in recent years they have reported a sharp increase in cases of STIs in Europe.

Rates are up dramatically over the past decade (see chart, next page), though they dipped during the pandemic because of a combination of less diligent surveillance and less casual shagging. After 2021 they leapt upwards. In May the European Union's Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) reported that in 2024, the most recent year for which it has figures, there were some 100,000 cases of gonorrhoea in Europe, over three times as many as in 2015. Cases of syphilis more than doubled, to around 46,000. Chlamydia is an exception: after peaking in 2022, prevalence has fallen back to the level of 2015.

The jump just after covid could be partly explained by testing facilities coming back online, says Dr Andrew Winter, an STI specialist in Glasgow. But the continued rise since then cannot. "There is a true increase in transmission happening," says Dr Stela Bivol, who runs the World Health Organisation's European office for STIs.

Why the venereal renaissance? Some blame reckless bed-hopping enabled by dating apps, but evidence is sparse. Users of such apps are more likely to have multiple partners, but that is partly because

people seeking multiple partners are more likely to use them. Dr Henry de Vries, a specialist in the Netherlands, notes that dating apps long predate the rise in STI prevalence. "I would be cautious," he says.

Another explanation is that people are using condoms less. But here too, the data are only suggestive. A study by the WHO of nearly 250,000 15-year-olds across Europe from 2014 to 2022 found a significant drop in reported condom use. But there are few data on population-wide condom usage among those aged 20 and up.

A more specific hypothesis is that using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a pill that fights the spread of HIV, leads more men (especially gay men) to dispense with condoms. A study of patients at a British clinic between 2015 and 2019, by Louis MacGregor of the University of Bristol and colleagues, supported that idea.

What is not disputed is the danger. Sexual diseases are usually treatable, but they can be devastating if not caught soon enough. Over time, chlamydia and gonorrhoea can cause testicular infections in men and infertility in women. One of the grimmest phenomena noted by the ECDC is a jump in congenital syphilis, passed on by mothers to their babies. This is rare but often fatal. Between 2023 and 2024 the number of cases doubled to 140, with clusters in Bulgaria, Hungary and Portugal.

Fighting STIs starts with working out ▶

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

28 Russia bans peace

29 Airports and drones

29 Could Moldova vanish?

30 Low Rhine, dry Danube

31 Charlemagne: Europe's uniters

28 Europe

► where they are spreading. Young men do not seem to be the focus. In the latest data, for 2023-24, gonorrhoea rates fell among males aged 15-24 but rose among older ones. Among women, gonorrhoea rates fell, while syphilis rates rose by 15%. The biggest increase was among those aged 20 to 34. Syphilis transmission seems to be especially high among men who have sex with men, but rates among heterosexual men and women have risen sharply too.

Geographically, the increase spans the continent. Some of the steepest rises in gonorrhoea in 2023-24 were in Bulgaria, France and Italy, while Belgium and Hungary saw sharp increases in syphilis. Some poor countries report misleadingly low rates because of inadequate surveillance: in Romania, with a population of 19m, just 24 chlamydia cases were recorded in 2024.

The ECDC says better monitoring is needed, including information on the proportion of vulnerable groups that are tested in each country. Only a third of European countries provide this data. Knowing whether infections were passed on through homosexual or heterosexual contact could help shape better public-health decisions, says Dr Otilia Mardh, an epidemiologist at the ECDC.

Countries with widespread testing have a different problem. Doctors treat STIs with antibiotics, which leads them to develop immunity. Gonorrhoea already has highly resistant strains. Chlamydia and syphilis do not, but the decision to treat involves weighing benefits against risk. The Netherlands recently cancelled chlamydia screening for people with no symptoms, after studies showed that asymptomatic infections were less likely to damage fertility than had been feared.

Even with syphilis, resources could be used more efficiently. Congenital syphilis, which is easily treated, could be tackled with focused testing during pregnancy. Most EU countries test women for syphilis in the first trimester, but fewer than half test those who are most at risk in the third trimester or at delivery.

One of the obstacles to reducing STIs is that many societies care less about the groups most at risk: men who have sex with men, migrants and sex workers. In parts of central and eastern Europe new HIV infections continue to rise, even as they have fallen elsewhere in the world. Stigma and discrimination, which deter people from seeking testing and treatment, are partly responsible.

But higher rates can themselves prompt a response. In Hungary a sharp rise in reports of congenital syphilis, which went from three cases in 2020 to 91 in 2024 (in part due to greater testing), led to much more rigorous screening. Dr Mardh notes that a recent study in which she took part found a drop in reported chlamydia cases in seven countries in 2023-24. A spike in gonorrhoea rates in the years before had led to public-health campaigns. Sometimes fear is the best medicine. ■

Russia and Yabloko

Banning peace

MOSCOW

A liberal party is barred for implicitly opposing the war

ON AUGUST 10TH several hundred mostly young people gathered in front of Russia's Supreme Court. The pavement was covered in chalk messages: "For Yabloko, for peace"; Alexei Navalny's slogan "Russia will be free"; and in Ukrainian, "We have no fear, we have love". They listened on their smartphones to the court's proceedings, as it decided whether to allow Yabloko (Apple), Russia's oldest liberal party and the only openly anti-war one, to run in legislative elections set for September 20th. The party's electoral manifesto consists of 43 words, the first two sentences in capital letters: FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM! FOR A LIFE WITHOUT FEAR!

Several young people sat in a row, eating apples. Someone holding a green apple and a Russian flag was hoisted above the crowd. A woman with dyed orange hair sat showily reading Kafka. After a few hours the judge, Vyacheslav Kirillov, disqualified Yabloko from the elections for the Duma, the lower house of Russia's legislature. "Whereas previously it was forbidden to speak out against the war, now it is forbidden even to simply speak out in favour of peace," notes Dmitry Kisiev, a political strategist in Moscow.

The case against Yabloko was a lawsuit filed by Rodina (Motherland), a Kremlin-controlled nationalist party, accusing it of "extremism". "Yabloko are national traitors. They are people who embrace Western

venues and are demanding our surrender," Alexei Zhuravlyov, Rodina's chairman, said after filing the suit. It also accused Yabloko of copyright violations for using old Soviet pacifist songs and for displaying photos of the bombing of Hiroshima, allegedly infringing the copyright of the American army.

It was less surprising that Yabloko had been struck from the ballot than that it had been allowed to register on July 29th. Apparently the Kremlin's election advisers, often known in Russia as "political technologists", considered it safe. Since 2007 Yabloko has failed to meet the 5% threshold to make it into the Duma, not only because of election fraud but because its support is low. Until this summer, polls put it at around 3%. It was seen as independent but accommodating, willing to make concessions to the Kremlin—and therefore unappealing to opposition-minded Russians.

Its main constituency was the ageing Soviet-era intelligentsia. By the time it registered, the Kremlin had depleted its leadership, knocking its most recognisable candidates off the list. Several, including Lev Shlosberg, have been arrested; others have been declared foreign agents. The Kremlin reckoned that Yabloko posed no threat, and would allow it to paint the opposition as marginal.

But on July 27th Yabloko declared it would run as the party of peace. "We support the earliest possible agreement for a ceasefire. We support diplomacy and negotiations. We stand for the absolute value of human life, freedom from fear and repression," the party's leader, Nikolai Rybakov, said in a keynote speech. Opinion polls suggest two-thirds of Russians back peace negotiations with Ukraine. Yabloko's popularity began to grow.

Its support quickly reached 5.3% in surveys by Russian Field, a pollster. By the time it was disqualified it had hit 9.3%. Social-media posts of young Russians eating apples, singing about apples or featuring an apple emoji gathered millions of views. Yabloko's Telegram channel grew to have more followers than that of United Russia, Vladimir Putin's party. It was endorsed by Russian politicians outside the country, including Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya.

The security services that dominate the Kremlin decided that keeping up the presence of a real election by allowing the party to campaign was too risky. The danger, says Vladislav Inozemtsev, a political analyst, was not so much that Yabloko might re-enter the Duma, but that "they will once again be able to openly and legally speak everywhere about the need for peace." Letting them win seats would have signalled political change; none has taken place.

The show trial highlighted public desire to halt the war. What lesson the authorities draw is a different matter. If they ►

The clap came back

Europe, sexually transmitted infections per 100,000 people

img-46.jpeg

Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Europe 29

► perceive an increasingly bold populace and a growing potential for protest, they will probably conclude that insufficient pressure, censorship and repression have been applied, argues Mr Kisiev. The Kremlin may attempt another military mobilisation after the Duma elections are over.

The threat of forced conscription is one of the regime's most powerful tools. As soon as the court's decision barring Yabloko from the elections had been announced, the young people in front of the courthouse began chanting 'Shame! Shame!' A police officer facing them from across the road delivered a warning through a megaphone: 'We're going to round you all up now. If anyone has got something in their head, I ask you to leave—to the metro, to the discos,' he said. 'If you don't disperse, don't take offence, but no one will come to rescue you from the military recruitment station.' ■

Drones and airports

Crash programme

Germany will have to gear up against hybrid warfare

ON THE EVENING of August 4th Leipzig-Halle Airport in Germany came close to disaster. A drone carrying 800 grams of plastic explosives was flown into the wing of a fully fuelled Ukrainian Antonov An-124, but the bomb fell off the drone instead of detonating. Had it done so, the giant transport plane, used by Ukraine and NATO to carry military loads, would have gone up in a fireball, as would a second An-124 parked next to it.

The drone, an FPV-style quadcopter, had been caught on camera entering the perimeter hours earlier. But no one noticed it until morning, when a bus driver spotted it, held it down with his foot and raised the alarm. The significance of the attempted attack for the future of airport security can hardly be exaggerated, says Charlie Edwards of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who co-authored a report last month on Russia's drone campaign against Europe.

It was a brazen escalation over last year's wave of reconnaissance and disruption drones around the continent. Leipzig-Halle is a big logistics hub for NATO and Ukraine. An attack with an armed drone is less hybrid warfare than warfare, full stop. Germany has not formally attributed it to Russia. But sources believe it soon will.

Unlike other infringing drones, such as two big Chinese-made ones that overflew a Patriot missile facility in Germany two

days later, the one in Leipzig was captured, providing a trove of evidence. Investigators say it is military-grade and suggest a state-linked actor built it. Rather than radio control, which airport sensors might have picked up, it used SIM cards and 5G antennas, like an ordinary mobile phone. Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at the German defence ministry, says its construction 'reflected the design of Russian drones used in Ukraine'.

After its discovery, a Boeing 757 collided with something at an altitude of 400 metres, possibly a spotter or repeater drone. Investigators reportedly found DNA traces on the captured drone linked to a failed attack in 2024, when parcel bombs exploded before being loaded aboard freight aircraft. That plot has been attributed to the GRU, a Russian spy service.

Germany must take emergency action, argues Mr Lange. It should deploy multi-layered detection systems at the country's main airports by the end of August. These would combine radars that can pick up unique motion patterns, software to detect anomalies on mobile networks, cameras to track targets and thermal and acoustic sensors. Eight German airports are already due to get such enhanced capabilities, but at a slower pace.

The Ukraine war has accelerated the development of drones that defy detection. They use frequency-hopping, encryption, fibre-optic cables and greater autonomy to baffle defences. Even with state-of-the-art detection systems, busy airports will be hard to defend. Weather, bird activity, background noise and dense infrastructure all help drones to hide.

After identifying a drone, the problem is what to do about it. Jamming it could disrupt the communications of commercial aircraft. Intercepting it could create

debris that might damage aircraft or injure people. Shooting it down to avoid catastrophe may be the right thing to do. But without clear protocols, anti-drone teams may err on the side of caution.

Leipzig got lucky. Europe's airports have had a nasty warning. Even with stronger defences, the threat will not disappear. In this sort of warfare, even an attack that seems to fail may succeed in sowing anxiety and confusion. ■

Moldova and Romania

Vanishing possibility

If you can't join the EU, then join an EU member

COULD MOLDOVA disappear? It has happened before: in 1918, just after separating from the collapsing Russian Empire, Moldova's parliament voted to join neighbouring Romania. Today the country aims to join the European Union by 2030. But recently its leaders have suggested that if the EU blocks that, then it might unify with Romania, which is already a member.

Maia Sandu, Moldova's president, has said she would vote 'yes' in a referendum on union with Romania. Eugen Osmochescu, a deputy prime minister, has called it 'Plan B'. Nicusor Dan, Romania's president, is a unionist, as are several other Romanian politicians. Most Moldovans speak Romanian, and most of its territory belonged to Romania between 1918 and 1940.

There is a realistic possibility that Moldova could complete the EU's accession demands by 2029. There is also a realistic possibility that French Eurosceptics will stop it anyway. France's constitution requires a referendum or the approval of three-fifths of both houses of parliament before assenting to let new countries into the EU. Moldova is unlikely to win either. Besides, by 2029 Marine Le Pen, a hard-right nationalist who opposes enlargement, may be president. That heightens the allure of the East German option: getting in by fusing with a neighbour.

In Romania polls show backing for union at around 70%, and in Moldova around 40%. Moldovan support has doubled over the past decade, says Iulian Groza, the director of the Institute for European Policies and Reforms, a think-tank. The country has a population of some 2.9m; an estimated 850,000 (including those living abroad) have Romanian citizenship. That is more pragmatic than ideological, as it enables them to work in the EU. But pragmatism may also convince them to forgo independence in favour of EU and NATO ►

img-47.jpeg

Trying not to have a blast

30 Europe

membership inside Romania. In the meantime many vote in Romanian elections, and helped elect Mr Dan.

Union is not on the near-term agenda, says Rufin Zamfir, a Romanian communications expert. Moldovan leaders' statements "should be interpreted as an indirect message to European partners". If the prospect of membership is postponed or watered down, he says, "the credibility of Plan B increases...[and] becomes a political variable that Brussels cannot ignore."

Union would not be simple. Romania is not wealthy enough to subsidise unification as West Germany did. Moldova is poor and lacks control over Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway statelet. A 1994 agreement with the Gagauz, a pro-Russian minority, gives them the option of independence if Moldova ever joins Romania.

Yet these issues may not be unresolvable. In its current straits, Russia can offer little support to Transnistria or Gagauzia. Already, because of Moldova's trade agreement with the EU, 70% of Transnistria's exports go to Europe. Gagauzia's population of 100,000 is scattered over four separate enclaves. Independence surrounded by EU borders would not be an enticing option.

Moldova is not the only candidate for disappearing. Large majorities in Albania and Kosovo, which is mostly ethnic-Albanian, favour uniting the countries. Albin Kurti, Kosovo's acting prime minister, supports fusion, but Edi Rama, Albania's prime minister, does not; he thinks the issue will be solved when both join the EU. The two leaders detest each other, and have whipped up clashes that have begun to divide their populations. It is unlikely but not inconceivable that within ten years, to achieve EU membership, Moldova will give way to a Greater Romania. A Greater Albania is harder to envisage. ■

The Danube and Rhine

Mammoths and sunken warships

BERLIN

Europe's rivers are running dry

WESTERN EUROPE is facing its fifth heatwave this year, and the waters of the Rhine and Danube rivers are the lowest since official records began in 1880. The gauge in Kaub, a medieval town in Rhineland-Palatinate, serves as the benchmark for the 1,230km-long river because it is near the Middle Rhine's shallowest section. On August 12th it showed a maximum depth of 12cm. The previous record, during a drought in 2018, was 25cm. It could fall to single digits in the next few days, accord-

img-48.jpeg

Serbs did Nazi that ship for decades

ing to Germany's association of inland shipping. That would cut the navigable Rhine in two.

The Danube, the second-longest river in Europe (after Russia's Volga), is hardly doing better. A gauge in Budapest shows 26cm, well below the previous record low of 33cm in 2018. That threatens the electricity supply. Paks, a nuclear plant near Budapest that produces 30% of Hungary's electricity, and Cernavoda, Romania's state-owned nuclear plant, have been partly or completely switched off: they use the Danube's water for cooling. Both countries' governments have asked industry and households to cut back electricity use as much as possible. Car companies such as Audi in Hungary and Dacia in Romania have scaled back production.

Along both rivers the low waters have exposed "hunger stones", river boulders carved between the 15th and 19th centuries to mark low water levels and warn of crop failures and famine. In Budapest they laid bare a Wehrmacht motorcycle from the second world war. Near the village of Ryahovo in Bulgaria, the remains of a mammoth became visible. In the Serbian stretch of the Danube a fleet of Nazi-era warships were revealed, among some 200 the Germans scuttled in September 1944 to stop Soviet troops from using the river.

The rivers play a big economic role. The Rhine accounts for roughly two-thirds of the European Union's inland-waterway freight traffic by volume, and over 99% of its waterborne container transport. The Danube carries around 8% of EU freight traffic by volume. To avoid running aground, barges are transporting just 15-20% of normal loads, driving up transport costs. "A barge with rock salt from Heilbronn usually carries 2,200 tonnes, but at the moment they arrive with 280 tonnes," says Christian Lorenz of Häfen und Güter-

verkehr Köln, a logistics firm in Cologne. That is still ten times what a lorry can handle, so companies continue to use them.

The Rhine is especially crucial for Germany, Europe's biggest economy. Some 600 vessels cross the German-Dutch border every day, many carrying goods to be exported from Rotterdam, Europe's biggest port. Bulk goods such as coal, steel, crude oil, chemicals and minerals are cheaper (and greener) to transport by barge than by lorry or train. Factory clusters were built along the Rhine in the 19th century to access barge transport and water for industrial processes, and they have remained there ever since, says Carsten Brzeski of ING, a Dutch bank. Bayer, a German pharma giant, is headquartered in Leverkusen, on the eastern bank of the Rhine. BASF, the world's largest maker of chemicals, is in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, a bit south on its namesake river.

Over the past decade businesses have started to adapt to recurrent low-water crises, holding bigger inventories and using ships built for shallower rivers. Many have switched from river to road or rail. In 2017 4.7% of all goods in Germany were transported by inland waterways; in 2024 that had fallen to 4.1%. But the drought has largely halted the thriving cruise-ship industry on both rivers. Farmers are worried about their harvests, and fishermen fear for their livelihoods.

How big will the economic hit be? The dry spell in 2018 reduced Germany's GDP by around 0.4% according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a think-tank. This year's water levels have been lower, so the damage may be worse. Mr Brzeski reckons that if they persist until October, that could shave 0.5% off German GDP. But as with the rest of central Europe, it is too early to quantify the impact. Europe's record-breaking drought is still in full swing. ■

Europe 31

Europe's true architects

The nominees for the Charlemagne column prize are...

img-49.jpeg

WHAT DOES it take to forge ever-closer union among Europeans? Ask a Eurocrat in Brussels and they will point to a torrent of harmonising edicts agreed over decades of all-night summits. By standardising chemicals regulations, mobile-phone chargers, bottle-cap design and so on, the European Union is pushing towards a federal state. The founding fathers of the EU championed this approach. For their troubles many went on to receive the Charlemagne prize, a gong bestowed by worthies in Aachen, the German city from which your columnist's namesake once ruled. These days the honour mostly goes to sitting presidents of EU institutions and other continental grandees.

Yet surely European integration is about more than summits and regulation (right?). Those who make Europe feel like a single continent not just in theory but in day-to-day life get too little recognition. A bauble is needed for those who knit Europeans together without ever having attended a summit or negotiated a directive. One might call it the Charlemagne column prize, or "Charlie" for short. The nominees for the inaugural award are...

Michael O'Leary. The EU is keen on free movement. Mr O'Leary, the boss of Ryanair since 1994, has enabled the next best thing: very cheap movement indeed. Fancy a weekend in a fourth-tier Romanian city? If you don't mind waking up before dawn and dragging yourself to a "secondary airport" far removed from human civilisation, you can get there for the price of a sandwich lunch. The cantankerous Irishman annoys EU-wallahs by railing against regulation—while having benefited from their drive to allow low-cost airlines to compete against staid flag-carriers.

Sofia Corradi. In 1969 this Italian academic conceived a system whereby university students could complete part of their degrees in another European country. Many jumped at the chance of an Erasmus year, a scheme now run by the EU. Given the number of pan-European romances—and the more than 1m "Erasmus babies" credited to the scheme—it is unclear how much studying actually goes on. "Mamma Erasmus", as Prof Corradi became known, passed away in October 2025. Her contribution to ever-closer union has brought some Europeans very close indeed.

Mads Mikkelsen. What do an Albanian terrorist financier with

James Bond in his sights, a Nazi scientist vying against Indiana Jones, a blood-soaked Norse warrior and a scheming French count all have in common? All were played by this brooding repository of continental dastardliness. For decades Brits had a monopoly on playing Hollywood baddies. It took one cheekboned Dane to wrest the villainy crown back for the European mainland.

Slavoj Zizek. Hundreds of millions of Europeans are collectively baffled by the pronouncements made by this Slovenian philosopher. The Lacanian-Hegelian theory of ideological subjectivity is as incomprehensible in Lapland as it is in Liguria.

Milda Mitkute. Different as they may be, all Europeans turn out to have a wardrobe full of unwanted clothes. Vinted, which Ms Mitkute co-founded in Vilnius in 2008, has created a single market in last season's double-breasted blazers. The result is a rare European tech success. What Robert Schuman once did for coal and steel, the Lithuanian firm now does for the humble Zara cardigan.

Aleksander Ceferin. The boss of UEFA is the world's second-most powerful football administrator. Seen another way, he is the most powerful football administrator to have never given a peace prize to Donald Trump. Europeans far and wide lauded the Slovenian for boycotting the recent FIFA World Cup final. The UEFA Champions League, where Gulf-owned clubs vie for glory, is one of the rare fixtures that draw Europeans together.

The Guetta family. Three French-born siblings together form an improbably complete portrait of modern Europe. Bernard is an MEP specialising in foreign affairs and human rights. Nathalie, a former circus performer, has become a star on Italian television. David, their half-brother, is a superstar DJ whose Ibiza hymns rival the croissant as Europe's most successful cultural export.

Pierre Coffin. The EU maintains 24 official languages. Mr Coffin has created a 25th, understood by children across the bloc: the patois of the Minions. The Frenchman voices the mumblings of the goggle-eyed yellow henchmen, which sound much the same in Finnish or French renderings. Europe has not possessed a dialect so readily understood across its borders since Latin.

Viviane Reding. As an EU commissioner in the late 2000s she quashed the mobile-phone roaming fees Europeans paid when visiting other EU countries, an expensive bugbear. Alas she also pioneered the data-privacy rules that resulted in Europeans having to bat away the irksome "cookie pop-ups" every website now serves up. The Luxembourgish pol serves as a reminder the Eurocracy is capable of both the sublime and the inane.

And the Charlie goes to...

Perhaps the modern unifiers of Europe are not good Europeans at all. Nobody has riled the continent into a collective jolt so much as its foes. There is Vladimir Putin, the Russian president whose invasion of Ukraine has revealed the EU's previously unknown steely side. Mr Trump has goaded Europe's defence efforts by threatening to ditch NATO. Viktor Orban tried his best to blackmail and derail the EU as Hungarian prime minister, but ultimately failed.

The inaugural Charlie might thus go to someone who has strengthened Europe by opposing it—albeit more constructively than Mr Putin. Such a paradoxical laureate springs to mind. For demonstrating the value of remaining in the EU rather than enduring the chaos of leaving, and for turning Brexit into a continental cautionary tale, Nigel Farage, its ideological architect, is awarded the first Charlemagne column prize. The EU's most famous basher has proved its most useful federalist. Glückwunsch! ■

INVEST WHERE CYBERSECURITY MEETS REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS.

NRW EUROPE'S | i | i | HEARTBEAT

Learn more: nrwglobalbusiness.com

img-50.jpeg

33

United States

img-51.jpeg

Iowa politics

Reap what you sow

DES MOINES

Republican policies have left Iowa reeling. Are voters ready for a change?

ROB SAND'S campaign gimmicks, to the extent that he has them, are better suited for a Norman Rockwell painting than a TikTok feed. The Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa begins his town halls with a sing-a-long of "America the Beautiful". He invites Republicans in the crowd to reveal themselves; those who do are welcomed with applause. Yet the even-tempered Mr Sand, who serves as the state's auditor, does not shy away from declaring a disaster where he sees one. Iowa, he insisted recently, is in the throes of three: an "economic crisis and a cancer crisis and an education crisis". Many voters agree.

Iowa has voted solidly Republican at the state and federal level for more than a decade. Republicans have dominated the state legislature since 2016; no Democrat has won the governorship since 2006, a Senate seat since 2008 or a congressional race since 2020. In the most recent presidential election, Donald Trump carried the

state by more than 13 points.

Yet Iowa is still home to a large bloc of independents—35% of registered voters—and they appear to be swinging left. Mr Sand is leading his Republican rival, according to an Emerson College/Nexstar poll published on August 6th. Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate, is in a tight race. And three out of four congressional districts are competitive. As the populist left advances elsewhere, Iowa is

offering a different example of how Democrats might return to power.

Their opportunity is born of growing discontent with Republican policies, state and national alike. The political affinity that many Iowans felt toward Mr Trump is fading, with the president's net approval rating at -8. That's in part because the bite of his economic policies has sharpened, says David Peters, an agricultural and rural policy professor at Iowa State University. Last year Iowa's soyabean producers saw net farm income fall by half. This year high fuel and fertiliser prices, inflated by the war in Iran, will make things worse.

The administration's crackdown on immigration is exacting another cost, limiting labour available to Iowa's meatpacking plants. It is also deepening Iowa's broader population problem. Because of the long-term ebb of residents to other states, foreign immigrants represented a crucial source of new workers.

Backlash is growing over environmental policy, too. The administration filed a brief seeking to limit cancer-related lawsuits against Bayer, a chemicals giant that produces a common pesticide. The Supreme Court sided with the company in June. But in Iowa, home to both mega-farms and residents whose water is affected by their runoff, the issue is increasingly contentious. Iowa has the second-highest cancer inci-

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

34 A new tariff weapon

35 Taking aim at vaccines

35 A comeback in Wisconsin

36 Mail-in voting endures

37 The transformation of Florida

38 Lexington: Lessons from Britain

34 United States

▶ dence in the country. Scientists don't know what, precisely, is driving this, but Iowa is one of only three states where rates are growing. For the past two summers, Des Moines has imposed restrictions on residents' water, citing high levels of nitrate, found in fertiliser. "You have 600,000 Iowans who can't use their water the way they might want to," says David Cwiertny at the University of Iowa.

If Mr Trump seems more appealing to Iowans in theory than in practice, the record of Kim Reynolds, the state's outgoing Republican governor, has been even more repellent. Conservative landowners were incensed by her veto of a bill to impose additional restrictions on a pipeline for a carbon-capture project. Moderate voters bristled at her restrictive new abortion policy, which bans the procedure after six weeks and allows an exception in instances of rape only if the crime is swiftly reported. A sweeping school-voucher programme has proved particularly polarising.

Iowa's public schools lost 13,000 students, or 3% of total enrolment, between 2022 and 2025. Some of that is down to population loss. However school vouchers, introduced in 2023, have accelerated the decline. Under the scheme, the state gives any family, regardless of income, about $8,000 per student to put toward private education. Because the state funds schools on a per-pupil basis, a school that loses students loses money.

Rural schools, already scraping by with tiny registrations, are further depleted, but the impact is broad. "Just because you're a large district or in a metro area in Iowa doesn't mean you're not feeling the same pressure of enrolment loss," says Kurt Subra, the chief financial officer of West Des Moines Community Schools. At the end of May, Jenna Lewis, a second-grade teacher in central Iowa, got a job in Ames, a city of about 66,000 people. She was "really excited", she says; Ames was a bigger, more affluent school district, and the position came with a $12,000 pay rise. Two weeks later, the principal called to revoke the offer. Because of low enrolment numbers, the school was cutting her class.

Presented with voters' frustration, Democrats are not so much grabbing the opportunity as greeting it politely. Mr Turek, a state lawmaker, won his Trump-friendly district in 2022 by focusing on the economy. In his race for an open Senate seat against Ashley Hinson, a Republican congresswoman, he calls himself a "prairie populist" and talks about pocketbook issues while suggesting that corruption is behind many of Iowans' struggles.

Mr Sand is trying to project himself as a non-partisan pragmatist. In June, as state auditor, he released a report contending that nearly 80% of families who used vouchers in 2025 were already sending

their kids to private schools, costing the state more than $250m. The theme of corruption figures into his town halls (as a former public prosecutor, he has some credibility), but he avoids villainising individuals. Instead he blames a system propped up by "two private clubs" that exploit political tribalism "to pick our pockets". He would not bring a Democratic agenda to Des Moines, he argues, but one grounded in independence and accountability.

Matt Paul, a Democratic strategist in Des Moines, remembers working on Tom Vilsack's campaign for governor in 1998. Iowa had not elected a Democratic governor for more than 30 years. "Tom's campaign came out with a very simple mantra," says Mr Paul: "It's time to rotate the crops." He notes that Mr Sand and others have adopted the slogan. "It feels a lot like '98 to me." Independents who voted for Mr Trump in 2024 now favour Mr Sand by a 17-point margin. ■

Foreign policy

Trading arm

Donald Trump is getting a new tariff weapon against Russia

"LOOK WHAT we've done here," remarked Lindsey Graham on learning in February that Donald Trump had launched America's war against Iran. "I almost cried." The Republican senator, who died last month, might have teared up again at the latest display of American muscle. On August 7th the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act by 86 votes to 11. The bill is

img-52.jpeg

Potential target

yet to clear the House, but has the backing of Mr Trump.

Focusing on Russia, the legislation involves both a sanctions scalpel and a tariff sledgehammer. It imposes sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, banks, the defence industry and energy projects—even in areas, such as Arctic energy development, that had been floated as candidates for co-operation between America and Russia in talks last year. These penalties cannot be lifted until Russia signs a peace deal accepted by Ukraine.

More unusually, the bill imposes tariffs of up to 100% on all goods from the top five importers of Russian oil and the top five importers of Russian gas, as well as those helping Russia to evade sanctions. That would ensnare more than a dozen countries, including many of America's friends. But there are two big caveats. Countries whose purchases represent less than 15% of Russia's gas exports—and who are taking steps to reduce those purchases—are exempt. That should spare allies such as France and Belgium. The bill also includes a "national-interest" waiver that gives the president plenty of latitude.

Depending on how they are implemented, the measures could have a significant impact on Russia. Oil and gas provide 20-25% of the government's revenues. "Taken at face value, this would have a devastating effect on Russian oil exports," says Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "You have an economy in stagflation with zero growth this year, probably."

But it is not clear how tightly the Trump administration wants to squeeze Russia's oil sector. America has already provided intelligence to Ukraine, helping it attack Russian energy infrastructure. The strikes have triggered a domestic fuel crisis. In July Russia's fossil-fuel export revenues fell by 12% month on month. Earnings from crude-oil exports by pipeline fell by 21%, while oil-product export loadings dropped by 23%, to their lowest level on record.

On August 12th Ukraine said it had attacked an oil refinery in Orsk, almost 1,000 miles behind the front line. Yet on the same day the Financial Times reported that J.D. Vance, America's vice-president, had asked Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, to halt attacks on a pipeline terminal in the Black Sea, for fear of harming American firms and driving up oil prices.

Beware collateral damage

Mr Trump may also be wary of upsetting other foreign-policy priorities by implementing the tariffs to their fullest extent. China, India and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian crude. Slovakia, a NATO ally, could hit the oil threshold and has few plans to change that. Japan depends on Russian gas. In practice, the bill gives Mr ▶

United States 35

Trump a sliding scale of enforcement: tariffs can be set anywhere from just above zero to 100%, and adjusted as countries buy more or less Russian energy.

Ten Democratic senators voted against the bill, fearing that it would hand Mr Trump a fresh weapon in his trade wars. One risk is that the Russia-related tariffs become bargaining chips in unrelated trade talks. Another is that punishment is meted out selectively—to friends, but not adversaries, as so often under Mr Trump.

The legislation is yet another sign of the ballooning role of tariffs in American statecraft. Mr Trump had already imposed unprecedented “secondary” tariffs on countries aiding Iran. The new bill applies the same idea to Russia. The paradox, note Julian Arato, Kathleen Claussen and Timothy Meyer in a new paper, is that this expansion of tariff power reflects “a more constitutionally sound approach” than Mr Trump’s earlier levies. ■

Vaccines

A booster of doubt

NEW YORK

The administration takes a fresh swipe at childhood vaccines

BACK WHEN he was a reality-TV star, Donald Trump tweeted: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines...AUTISM.” More than 12 years later, on August 10th, Mr Trump acted on the thinking behind that dubious claim. A new executive order says the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine should be split into three. It advises giving those and other jabs

at separate doctor visits. And it puts childhood vaccines into three buckets: those recommended for everyone (covering 11 diseases and infections, down from 18), those for high-risk groups and those to be decided on after talking to a doctor.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Nor is there evidence that spreading out vaccines is beneficial. In fact, doing so increases the window in which kids are vulnerable to infection. Doctors’ groups, therefore, lined up to denounce the order. The head of the American Academy of Paediatrics called it “not only disheartening but dangerous”. It puts “children’s health at risk”, said the boss of the American Medical Association.

The good news, then, is that Mr Trump’s order will have little practical effect. States, not the federal government, normally set vaccination requirements for schoolchildren. And most of them are guided by abundant evidence that vaccines have driven down rates of infectious disease by a miraculous degree (see chart).

But as the administration injects more doubt and confusion into decisions over vaccines, parents are increasingly declining them. Measles vaccination coverage among kindergarteners is 92.5%, down from 95.2% in 2019. That is worryingly low: an estimated 92-94% of a community must be immune to stop measles spreading. Many areas are already below that threshold, helping to explain why 2026 has already outpaced all of 2025 for measles cases.

The executive order is not the administration’s first swing at vaccines. In January the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to pare back the schedule of jabs for kids. A judge halted the changes; the case is being appealed. In May another executive order instructed the CDC to copy countries that recommend fewer vaccines. Most consequentially, the

administration has cut funding for next-generation mRNA vaccines.

Nearly 80% of Americans think vaccines are safe, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, including most Republicans. Mr Trump’s favoured pollster has urged him to focus on other parts of Robert F. Kennedy junior’s agenda, like the health secretary’s promotion of nutritious food. Mr Trump’s decision to ignore that advice shows that vaccines are not just Mr Kennedy’s obsession, but the president’s too. ■

Wisconsin politics

Left for dead

MILWAUKEE

A surprising comeback in Wisconsin is a reprieve for Democratic moderates

OUTSIDE A POLLING centre in Milwaukee on the morning of August 11th, Sabley Sabin looks deflated. “I didn’t vote with my heart,” says the retired social worker, who has just cast her ballot in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor. Calling mainstream Democrats “wusses”, she preferred Francesca Hong, an insurgent Democratic Socialist. But she voted for David Crowley (pictured on next page). She reckons the moderate Milwaukee County executive has a better shot at building the coalition needed to win an election in a swing state like Wisconsin.

Other Wisconsinites seemed to share Ms Sabin’s calculation. For weeks polls had shown Ms Hong poised to win by double digits. In the end, Mr Crowley defeated her—though by some 3,800 votes. His victory suggests that appeals to moderation and electability still matter, especially in swing states. But Ms Hong’s near-win in spite of her considerable political baggage points to a Democratic coalition that is angry, restless and increasingly receptive to populist-left candidates.

There were reasons to think Wisconsin, with its rich history of progressive politics, might be fertile ground for a candidate like Ms Hong. But some of the views she espoused proved a liability. In an old tweet she called for Thanksgiving to be cancelled, saying it celebrated colonialism. In another she wrote that old white people at Culver’s, a fast-food chain, gave her “anxiety”. She had also expressed support for abolishing the police. When pressed on these comments, she struggled to explain them. David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, called the race a “slow-rolling car headed for a cliff”. Even some of the left’s biggest names kept their distance. Neither Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Ms Hong. ▶

Cause and effect

United States, cases of vaccine-preventable diseases*, '000

img-53.jpeg

img-54.jpeg

img-55.jpeg

img-56.jpeg

img-57.jpeg

Sources: Our World in Data; CDC; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

*Data to August 6th 2026 or latest available

36 United States

Despite all that, polling showed her leading by 19 points in a crowded field. Mr Crowley suspended his campaign on July 8th, saying he had no path to the nomination. An effort by establishment Democrats to consolidate behind Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor, fell apart after she fired her campaign manager over financial mismanagement. Only in the final stretch did the party's powerbrokers get their act together. Mr Crowley re-entered the race and won the endorsement of Tony Evers, the Democratic governor, who had previously vowed to stay out of the primary. The manoeuvring was so chaotic that several voters at a Milwaukee polling station had not realised Mr Crowley had ever suspended his campaign.

Advertising probably helped Mr Crowley make up ground on Ms Hong, who did not buy a single ad on broadcast or cable television. The polls may also have exaggerated his deficit. For the second time in a week surveys vastly overestimated the lead of a left-wing candidate (the other instance was Michigan's Senate primary).

Whatever explains his comeback, Mr Crowley now has a chance to become the state's first black governor. Standing in his way is Tom Tiffany, a Republican congressman endorsed by Donald Trump. Mr Tiffany is already portraying his opponent as indistinguishable from Ms Hong. A day after the primary he reposted an interview in which Mr Crowley said that there was little difference between their policies.

Still, there is relief among mainstream Democrats, who feared Ms Hong stood little chance against Mr Tiffany. After a sleepless night waiting for ballots to be counted, Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist, was effusive about Mr Crowley's victory. For decades to come, he says, "campaigns will sing the songs of David Crowley and his comeback for the ages." ■

img-58.jpeg

A moderate success

Election law

Post haste

NEW YORK

Donald Trump's attack on mail-in voting looks doomed

ABOUT A THIRD of Americans voted by mail in 2024, including roughly a quarter of Republicans (see chart). Yet nine months later Donald Trump vowed to "get rid of mail-in ballots". The president falsely claims that fraudulent postal voting contributed to his loss in 2020. His efforts in Congress and the courts to secure new limits on this popular way of casting a ballot have, thus far, come up short. His executive order on March 31st directing the United States Postal Service (USPS) to serve as ballot gatekeeper is fizzling, too.

On August 11th a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the main provision of Mr Trump's order, with nationwide effect. Judge Indira Talwani noted that the president's "unprecedented directive" is "causing confusion" among voters less than three months before the midterm elections. All 50 states offer mail-in voting, with eight conducting elections entirely by post. Despite Mr Trump's efforts, the rules for such ballots during this election cycle are now unlikely to change.

Mr Trump's order attempts to subject mail and absentee ballots to federal control through a complex series of lists and new postal rules. It instructs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create "state citizenship lists" identifying all citizens aged 18 or over and send them to each state. States must then provide the postal service with rosters of voters eligible for those ballots, presumably after consulting the DHS lists—though the order does not specify that. Finally, states must use new, USPS-designed envelopes with special markings and bar codes. The postal service is barred from delivering ballots posted in unauthorised envelopes or by voters missing from the relevant lists.

The jumble of lists confuses even election-law experts like Derek Muller of the University of Notre Dame. "It is quite unclear to me how the various lists are supposed to interact with one another," he says. Part of the confusion regards timing. The deadlines for the federal government sending lists to the states and the states sending lists to the USPS are both 60 days before an election, which seems to make it difficult for the former to inform the latter.

But the legal infirmity is deeper than the warped logistics. The constitution assigns states the power to set the "times, places and manner" of congressional elections and allows Congress to "make or al-

Envelope, please

United States, % of voters casting postal votes

img-59.jpeg

Source: MIT Election Data & Science Lab

ter" those regulations. The president gets no mention. In Ms Talwani's words, "the executive branch has no authority to regulate elections." Mr Trump's policy, she argues, runs roughshod over America's separation of powers.

The Supreme Court is mulling a request from the administration, filed on July 27th, to reverse an earlier, narrower decision by Ms Talwani. (On August 12th it filed a supplemental request asking the court to rule expeditiously.) But with election deadlines looming, the justices staying mum for more than a fortnight does not bode well for its plea, says Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St Louis. And even if the Supreme Court overturns her initial ruling, Ms Talwani's new decision—handed down in a separate case brought by voting-rights groups and Delta Sigma Theta, an African-American sorority that provides election education—would still stand in the administration's way. Rick Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, reckons the executive order is "totally unworkable" and has little hope of being implemented this autumn.

Mr Trump continues to push other changes to election rules, which look similarly ill-fated. The SAVE America Act, a voter-registration bill, failed to pass the Senate before the August recess and has meagre support. Mr Trump does not rule out more drastic measures, including nationalising elections, but that move has no precedent or constitutional basis. The main achievement of these efforts, as Mr Trump probably knows, may be not a change to the rules of the midterm elections but greater distrust of their outcomes. ■

United States 37

The transformation of Florida

MAGA-land

OCALA

Ron DeSantis has turned a swing state red. But the next governor of Florida will have to focus more on costs than culture

HE IS NEVER the most charming man in a room, but Ron DeSantis is often the most formidable. Speaking at a political club in Naples in February, Florida's governor reflected on his two terms. "I sat there on the first day as governor, I looked around the empty office and I was just like, listen I don't know what SOB is going to succeed me but they are not going to have a lot to do because I'm going to get all the meat off the bone that I can," he said. Seven years into the job, Mr DeSantis reckons he has delivered. "That's what we've done."

On August 18th voters in Florida will choose the Democrat and Republican who will battle to become that SOB. Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman, is expected to win his party's nomination handily. If elected governor in November, as pollsters predict, Mr Donalds will inherit a state that looks little like it did a decade ago. What was once America's quintessential swing state has become a bastion of Republican power.

That is in part due to Donald Trump, with whom Mr DeSantis has had a tumultuous relationship. During the 2024 presidential campaign Mr Trump dismissed his then rival as "Ron DeSanctimonious". The president has since chosen Floridians as some of his top advisers and made his Mara-Lago resort the White House's unofficial southern annex. He has thus stamped Florida as MAGA-land.

Mr DeSantis, though, has transformed the state itself. Before the covid-19 pandemic, Democrats outnumbered Republicans and elections in Florida were nail-biters. But that began to change when, in the depths of the pandemic, Mr DeSantis broke with much of the country and declared Florida open for business. In just two years the state gained nearly 1m net residents, at a pace of 1,500 a day.

Remaining open, particularly in a state with so many old people, had a cost. During a wave of covid from July to November 2021, Florida's per-person death rate was more than triple the national average. But Mr DeSantis faced little lasting backlash. Most new residents were registered Republicans. The state's Democrats, meanwhile, struggled to recruit candidates or attract donors. In 2022 Mr DeSantis was re-elected by 19 points, the biggest margin for a Republican in state history. His party swept every statewide office and won a supermajority in the legislature.

One-party rule unleashed a policy blitz. Mr DeSantis enacted a six-week abortion ban, prohibited transgender medical care for children, created the biggest school-voucher programme in America and re-wrote curricula at state universities. He also took on Disney over its opposition to a law that prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, revoking its special tax treatment. The fight became a cautionary tale for outspoken firms across the country.

To cement the state's new political identity, Mr DeSantis rejected the legislature's congressional map and drew his own, sacked two elected Democratic prosecutors and called special sessions to force lawmakers to act on his priorities. He also remade the judiciary, appointing six of the state Supreme Court's seven justices and nearly 200 other judges. Lawmakers did not always welcome his demands, but the governor was quick to veto their projects or back challengers when they crossed him. "DeSantis is the 800-pound gorilla in Florida," says Nick Iarossi, a strategist who worked on the governor's campaigns. "No one wants to be on his bad side."

Juiced up

During Mr DeSantis's tenure Florida's GDP growth has outpaced the national average. This year the state's $1.8trn economy became the world's 14th-largest, surpassing that of Australia and Mexico. Big firms

such as Citadel and Palantir moved their headquarters to Florida. Mr DeSantis has an approval rating of just over 50%—higher than Mr Trump's in the state.

Mr Donalds is nothing like Mr DeSantis. A congressman raised by a single mother in Brooklyn, he was arrested for possessing marijuana as a teenager. His life turned a corner, he says, after he committed himself to Jesus in the car park of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. He had a career in banking, then was elected to Congress. When insurgent House Republicans moved to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker in 2023, they rallied around the affable Mr Donalds, elevating him as a national MAGA figure. Mr Trump is a fan. "RUN, BYRON, RUN!", he wrote on social media last year.

Although Mr DeSantis quipped that Mr Donalds "hasn't been a part of any of the victories that we've had here over the left", the congressman only has nice words in return. "He's done a phenomenal job," he told voters in early August. On policy, he says, there is no daylight between them. His only public break with Mr DeSantis came over revisions to Florida's African-American history curriculum, which asserted that slaves "developed skills" that "could be applied for their personal benefit"—a claim Mr Donalds, a rare black Republican, called "wrong".

The next governor will have to focus more on costs than culture. Since 2020 Florida's home prices and insurance premiums have surged by 50% and 75% respectively, faster than in most other states. Incomes have risen by only 30%. That is creating a crunch for ordinary people. Population growth is dramatically slowing. Mr Donalds says "affordability" is his top priority. Governors across the country say the same. If Mr Donalds can show them how, his effect on Florida could surpass even that of Mr DeSantis. ■

img-60.jpeg

Him, sanctimonious?

38 United States

What Democrats can learn from Britain

How to stop extremists from making a party unelectable

img-61.jpeg

NEIL KINNOCK is best known in America as the man whose oratory Joe Biden plagiarised. In 1987 Mr Biden was so taken by the British Labour Party leader's line about being the first of his family "in a thousand generations" to attend college that he borrowed it. At first, with due credit. Then, on television, without. The ensuing furore helped sink Mr Biden's first run for the presidency.

Yet Lord Kinnock, as he is now known, is not just the man who condemned Mr Biden to another 21 gruelling years in the Senate. He also helped make Britain's main centre-left party electable again, by purging hard-left extremists who had infiltrated it. His story is one the Democratic Party could usefully study.

It, too, is struggling with infiltrators: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a populist-left group that is on a roll. The DSA stumbled this week when Francesca Hong, who once called for abolishing the police, narrowly lost the Democratic nomination to be Wisconsin's next governor. But candidates backed by the DSA are winning enough primaries, and making enough noise, to delight Republicans.

The parallel with Britain in the 1980s is striking. Back then Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister, was enraging the left by curbing unions and privatising state-owned industries. (Maggie, unlike MAGA, believed in free markets.) Labour was desperate to unseat her, but first had to convince voters it was trustworthy. This was made harder by Militant, a Marxist group that practised "entryism": rather than running for office under their own banner, its cadres entered a larger party and sought to turn it far to the left—just as the DSA does with the Democrats.

Militant was more extreme than the DSA—and more secretive. In public, it offered simple slogans: shorter hours, higher wages, nationalise the 200 biggest private companies, and so on. But this public platform was, following Leon Trotsky's formula, merely a step towards its true, secret agenda: leading a revolution, like the one in Russia before Stalin went too far.

Militant's leaders were, to put it mildly, out of touch with the median voter. Pat Wall, a Militant-backed Labour candidate in Bradford, called for the overthrow of the state and predicted a "civil war" with "terrible death and destruction and bloodshed".

Unsurprisingly, Militant's secret agenda did not remain secret. Britain in the 1980s had a gloriously muckraking press and a ruling party that played hardball, as a non-cricketing nation might put it. A Sunday Times reporter tacitly recorded Wall's "civil war" comments; the Tories gleefully quoted them in campaign ads. The sense that Labour was being taken over by scary Marxists helped keep the party out of power for 18 years. In the one big city that Militant ended up running, Liverpool, it brought lawlessness, fiscal ruin and endless scandal.

There are differences between Britain then and America now. The DSA is not plotting a violent revolution. It is obsessed with opposing Israel, whereas Militant thought every global conflict could be soothed with socialism. The DSA is passionate about gay rights; Militant thought homosexuality was "a problem which will disappear under socialism", in the paraphrase of Michael Crick, author of "Militant", a fine book on the movement.

What the two episodes have in common, though, is a small group with unpopular and potentially disastrous policies determined to foist them on a bigger party. For the DSA, the key insight has been that not many people vote in primaries, so a well-organised entryist group needs to win over only an impassioned few to capture a Democratic nomination.

For Militant, the method was to foster a cultlike devotion among its followers while denying to outsiders that its party-within-a-party existed at all. (Its top leaders claimed to be merely editors of Militant, a newspaper.) Its foot soldiers would join a local Labour chapter without revealing their true loyalty, and attend every meeting, no matter how boring. They would create a faction with other leftists and win control of it by showing up. They would repeat this process until they controlled the whole chapter. "They always appeared to give primacy to securing power within the party rather than for the party," recalls Lord Kinnock.

In October 1985, at a Labour conference, Lord Kinnock denounced the ultra-left's "impossible promises" and "rigid dogma" and the "grotesque chaos" of Militant-run Liverpool. On television, he called Militant "a maggot in the body of the Labour Party", and braved a hostile mob of its supporters screaming "scab" at him—the harshest insult in the lefty lexicon, denoting a class traitor who crosses a picket line.

He set about expelling Militant members from Labour—no easy task when they hid their affiliation. Fainthearts accused him of conducting a witch-hunt. Nonsense, he retorted, Labour's constitution clearly barred its party-within-a-party tactics. He had to persuade people, he remembers, that "even the broadest churches had walls and if they didn't they ended up as heaps of rubble." He succeeded, eventually. He was never prime minister, but he paved the way for Tony Blair and 13 years of Labour rule from 1997.

Exit, stage left

The Democrats cannot simply plagiarise the Kinnock model. Their party is less centralised; its leaders cannot stop radicals from competing in primaries. But they could heed what Labour learned in its wilderness years: that utopias are not real, that gradualism is not betrayal and that the electorate are not "incidental onlookers". A left-wing party must constantly prove "that its idealism is not lunacy", as R.H. Tawney, a historian, once put it. The alternative in Britain in the 1980s was a principled Conservative government with no effective opposition. In America today, Lord Kinnock fears, it could be "prolonged, unimpeded Trumpism". ■

39

The Americas

img-62.jpeg

Venezuelan politics

The real talks begin

CARACAS

The United States is pushing Venezuela towards democracy

“IT’S DISRESPECTFUL, it’s obscene, it’s spitting in their faces.” That is how Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s rubber-stamp National Assembly, described the idea of discussing institutional reforms just weeks after two big earthquakes struck the country. He should have asked the victims. “Any change that removes power from the current government in any way is positive,” says Francis Riascos, camped by the rubble and hoping to find his brother’s body.

Nor did Mr Rodríguez convince Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who has wielded enormous influence in Venezuela since special forces seized the dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. Three days after Mr Rodríguez slammed the idea, he returned and announced talks with the opposition on exactly such matters. Mr Rubio soon conspicuously praised the plan.

Talks began in person on August 6th. The United States chose Dinorah Figuera

to lead the opposition team. She was the president of the National Assembly elected in 2015, the last Venezuelan legislature recognised by the United States. The other five negotiators are also exiled deputies from the same assembly. The regime’s team is led by Mr Rodríguez. His sister, Delcy Rodríguez, is the interim president and was Mr Maduro’s deputy.

After six days of talks the first round ended on August 12th with a joint statement promising more work, and an initial agreement on a process of judicial reforms including a new appointment mechanism for the justices of the Supreme Court. Pao-

la Bautista de Alemán, a senior member of Ms Figuera’s party, called it “a major step towards democracy”. They also agreed to work together on recovering gold reserves frozen at the Bank of England to be used to help earthquake victims.

This is the first big attempt by Donald Trump’s government to reshape Venezuelan politics since the January raid. Until now it has focused on trying to boost oil and mining to the benefit of American businesses. The talks are controversial. They do not include María Corina Machado, the leading opposition figure. The regime, which has clung to power for 27 years, is skilled at ensuring dialogue produces no serious change. Yet there are reasons for hope. The negotiation agenda is sensible. Ms Machado’s absence for now is manageable. Most important, the Trump administration has extraordinary leverage. Much depends on its intentions.

American hands are everywhere. The administration has been working with Ms Figuera since February and was involved in warm-up meetings in Madrid to hash out the agenda. In Caracas the opposition’s negotiating team stayed at the Marriott hotel, from which the United States runs much of its embassy operations. The team moves in embassy cars and their security is guaranteed by the United States. Ms Figuera talks directly to Mr Rubio about pro-

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

41 Donald Trump’s bullying of Canada

41 Brazil’s new warships

42 An earthquake in Colombia

40 The Americas

► gress. The Trump administration forced the regime to the table.

There are good reasons the talks are happening now. In Washington, with mid-terms looming, Republicans and Democrats are demanding progress on elections in Venezuela. Moreover, Venezuela's oil sector, Mr Trump's priority, is not booming, which is making economic stabilisation harder (see chart). The government's sluggishness in clarifying the new tax regime and investor doubts about the rule of law have resulted in few oil deals so far. The Trump administration may have concluded that to attract serious investments they must first show political progress.

The official agenda has three parts: helping victims of the earthquakes; strengthening democracy; and political rights and guarantees. Working groups are being set up for each area. Under strengthening democracy, the most important issues are reforms to the electoral council and the Supreme Court. These run and adjudicate elections—and brazenly allowed Mr Maduro to steal the presidential election in July 2024, which was actually won by the candidate Ms Machado backed.

Remaking democracy

Expect intense negotiations over who will sit on the five-person electoral council and in the Supreme Court's electoral and constitutional chambers. Many opposition politicians have been banned from running and their political parties co-opted by the regime. Negotiators will argue about reinstating these political rights. The timeline is brisk. Ms Figuera says reform of the electoral council is an 'assignment that we have to deliver' by December. For the Supreme Court the deadline is November, and for political rights, October. The boss setting these targets is surely Mr Rubio.

The regime's priority is relief from sanctions and access to frozen state resources. That is partly why helping earthquake victims, important but not disputed, is on the agenda. Including it enables wider discussion on access to offshore funds.

The Economist understands two other topics will at least be discussed. The fate of political prisoners, omitted from the official agenda, is expected to feature on the margins. About 380 such prisoners remain behind bars, though some 900 have been freed since January. The second is guarantees for those who lose power after elections, a crucial and difficult topic. If Ms Rodríguez and her inner circle believe that losing elections means rotting in jail for their crimes, they will do everything they can to avoid real concessions.

Many Venezuelans hope the negotiations culminate in a full election timetable. That is unlikely. Instead, it will be up to the new electoral council to set out a schedule. At best, the negotiators may agree broad

timeframes for elections for the electoral council to flesh out. The regime may well press to begin with regional elections, so as to delay a presidential poll.

The ongoing negotiations will be fiendishly difficult. The two sides don't even agree on what they are about. The opposition believes they are negotiating an end to dictatorship. The regime sees talks as a way to manage a long-running, two-sided political conflict. The dynamics within the regime are growing more difficult, too. Elías Jaua, a vice-president of Venezuela under the late Hugo Chávez, is furious at the 'pillage' of the country by the 'plutocracy' of the United States. He describes Ms Rodríguez as the 'colonial governor' and says the Venezuelan political class must now stand up more firmly to the Trump administration. He rejects these talks and wants ones which include all elements of Venezuelan politics.

The regime is expert at playing for time and reneging on promises. This is at least the eighth formal dialogue and the 18th initiative to hold talks of any kind since 1999. Yet the regime is still in power. The Trump administration lacks expertise in Venezuela and appears to be improvising, says Phil Gunson, who is based in Caracas for the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. To the opposition's dismay, the United States will not always be in the room for meetings between the two sides.

Still, Mr Rubio is deeply invested in success in Venezuela. He has extraordinary power over the regime. All Venezuela's oil revenue, more than $14bn this year so far, goes to accounts at the US Treasury. Disbursements to the regime are made only with approval, ultimately, from Mr Rubio. The latent military threat also matters. Defying the country that recently seized your president is a different prospect to ignoring Norway, which facilitated the most recent talks in 2022. Indeed, since January 3rd, the ruling cabal has bent over backwards to please Mr Trump, including ramming through a new oil law, extraditing a former cabinet minister and co-operating

with the United States on security.

It is less clear that the Trump administration will use this leverage to push for a transition to democracy. Though Mr Rubio appears committed to elections, Mr Trump does not. 'Delcy's been doing a fantastic job,' he enthused again in July.

The other big worry is that Ms Machado is not involved. That, too, is an American choice. The administration apparently thinks that because she is a potential candidate, she should not help to set electoral rules. The regime also loathes her, and so her presence might have made it harder to get it to negotiate and thus increased the risk that the talks collapse.

Ms Machado had a very different plan for negotiations. In late May she convened the numerous opposition parties in Panama, where they publicly agreed that she would lead talks. The United States paid no heed. She was also twice blocked, partly by the Trump administration, from returning to Venezuela after the earthquakes. She remains in Panama.

All this has also divided the opposition. Justice First, Ms Figuera's party, says they immediately informed Ms Machado of the United States' plan when it emerged in April. Ms Machado, however, maintains that she was simply not consulted. Both opposition political parties now in the negotiations were among those that agreed in May in Panama that Ms Machado would lead any negotiations. Some close to Ms Machado are talking of 'betrayal'.

Missing Machado

Justice First is keen to emphasise that they invited Ms Machado to join a group of senior figures for consultation and decision making to guide the negotiators, but that she did not accept. 'Trust is broken,' says Henry Alviárez, who leads Ms Machado's party in Venezuela today. Ms Machado nonetheless promises not to obstruct the talks and to judge them on their results.

Her absence hurts the talks' legitimacy. They still have a chance to lead to institutional reforms and a path to elections, but if Ms Machado were in Venezuela and backing the talks, her huge public support would add pressure for the regime to make concessions. Her absence is also a problem for discussions about guarantees for losers. Under free elections, she is the most likely next president. For guarantees to be credible, the regime must believe she will uphold them.

The regime's position is that Ms Machado is legally barred from standing as a candidate. Her supporters worry that the Trump administration may indulge this in the belief that it will ease the transition. Ms Machado herself angrily rejects the idea.

Such a stitch-up seems unlikely. Yet, as with so much in Venezuela, it depends on Mr Rubio and, above all, on Mr Trump. ■

Maduro's gone, inflation remains

Venezuela, consumer prices, % increase on previous month

img-63.jpeg

Source: Banco Central de Venezuela

The Americas 41

Canada v the United States

A bridge too far

OTTAWA

Mark Carney's pragmatic response to Donald Trump is correct but unpopular

THE GORDIE HOWE International Bridge is a 2.5km-long monument to the perils of appeasing Donald Trump. Canada footed the entire bill of C$6.4bn ($4.6bn) for the gleaming new span over the Detroit river to the United States. But America's president threatened for months to block its opening, relenting only when the United States got a cut of the toll revenues. Traffic at last began to flow in late July. Canadians cringed at Mark Carney's evasive explanation for the shakedown. Mr Trump then rewarded his compliance by announcing new tariffs of 50% on a range of goods imported into the United States from its northern neighbour.

If the new tariffs come into force as expected on August 19th, Canada will be the first country to be subjected to tariffs under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed in 1930, allowing the American president to respond to perceived discrimination over trade. Tariffs under that act, unlike the emergency duties struck down by the US Supreme Court in February, need no congressional approval. "This looks a lot like the future of Donald Trump's trade policy because it gives him flexibility," says Eric Miller, head of the Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, a trade consultancy in Washington.

Mr Trump is using this freedom to put tariffs on $20bn of exports to the United States, 5% of the total sent south every year. These would pile up next to other du-

ties that have hobbled Canada's car, steel, aluminium, wood and copper industries. Crucially, and unlike the emergency tariffs imposed last year, the new ones also hit goods covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade.

Mr Carney may think he has room to negotiate. He needs it. He was elected last year partly because he stood up to Mr Trump, promising to get "an even better deal" than the USMCA. Yet concession has followed concession. Canada dropped its digital-services tax on mostly American social-media giants, then ended most of its retaliatory tariffs and a different tax on streamers such as Netflix. Mr Trump's response has been indifference. "We don't need them," he said on July 28th ahead of negotiations over the USMCA with Mexico as well as Canada. "The deal is important for them. It's not important for us."

This bullying appears to be hurting Mr Carney at home, particularly over the Gordie Howe embarrassment. Canada agreed to pay for the bridge in 2012 as long as it took all toll revenue until costs were recovered. After Mr Trump enforced a new deal, Mr Carney claimed repeatedly that Canada's costs would still be paid first.

A crowing tweet from Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, made clear it was untrue. For the first 15 years of operation the United States will take half of net revenue, after operating costs but before debt repayment. This will cost Canada some C$300m. The share of Canadians who say they feel confident that Mr Carney can land a good deal with Mr Trump fell by eight percentage points between April and July, according to Angus Reid, a pollster.

The same poll shows Canadians are still outraged by Mr Trump's tariffs; almost two-thirds want Mr Carney to hit back with tariffs of his own. But that would only increase Canada's pain. "You've got to real-

ise that punching the bully back here is also going to punch the Canadian people in the guts," says Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan. Mr Carney has sent negotiators to Washington to intensify discussions to extend USMCA. Mr Trump's team declined to do this in early July; there is still a chance he could agree. Mr Carney says he won't retaliate by playing Canada's strongest card: curbing exports of energy.

In 1930 Canada did not show Mr Carney's level of forbearance. It retaliated against Smoot-Hawley pre-emptively, launching tariffs of its own on American imports before the bill had even become law. Many other countries retaliated too. Within four years the nominal value of world trade had fallen by two-thirds and the global depression had hit its nadir.

Unpleasant as it is, Canadians should hope that Mr Carney's resolve holds. And everyone else must hope that other world leaders are equally courageous when Mr Trump turns his new tariffs on them. ■

Brazil's navy

Building its own boats, at last

After many failures the country is procuring more of its own weaponry

OVER THE past few decades Brazil's naval shipbuilding efforts have mostly sunk without trace (literally, in the case of one aircraft-carrier, which was scuttled in an effort to hide its uselessness). Since the 1970s the country has launched and abandoned at least three warship programmes. But in April it commissioned a new frigate-class ship, the Tamandaré, the first of four to be built entirely in Brazil. The construction of a second batch of four has been provisionally agreed. The vessel can detect submarines and fire missiles and torpedoes. A helicopter pad allows for wide areas to be patrolled without a fleet of costly destroyers. The craft would be a decent staple for any navy.

Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS), a German shipbuilding company, agreed to work with Embraer, Brazil's aerospace champion, to construct the ships in Itajaí, in the southern state of Santa Catarina. Their successful production is a dramatic improvement for a country that lacks a reputation for military muscle. Brazil has hitherto used second-hand European frigates built in the 20th century. The structure of the project is designed to encourage domestic supply chains and create a skilled local workforce. The country has previously built some small warships at home, but the Tamandaré-class is a big step up. ▶

img-64.jpeg

Mr Trump's other chokepoint

42 The Americas

This success marks a broader effort to beef up defence. As a share of GDP, Brazil's military spending has for 30 years been flat or falling. It is now 1.1%. That will rise. Brazil spent $24bn on its armed forces last year, an increase of 13% from 2024. As well as the new frigates, it also has plans to build nuclear-powered submarines, which would be a first for a non-nuclear power. In 2022 the government ordered 19 tactical and refuelling aircraft. In March it unveiled the first supersonic fighter assembled in Brazil, a Gripen jet built in partnership with Sweden's Saab.

Governments all over Latin America are spending more on defence. Peru and Colombia have both placed multi-billion-dollar fighter-jet orders in the past year, for example, Peru for American F-16s and Colombia for Swedish Gripen.

It is tempting to conclude that more defence spending, and the desire to build at home, is due to shifting geopolitics in Latin America. In July Brazil's government said that 'there exists a risk of US military force being used against Brazilian territory.' It was referring to recent events such as the capture of the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro, in January, and the American bombing campaign against boats allegedly involved in drug-trafficking in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. With the United States adopting a more threatening posture, perhaps it is no wonder that countries in its hemisphere want greater means to defend themselves.

Already anxious

But Louis Bearne at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a global think-tank, says Brazil's spending is 'a continuation of a long-term trend'. The expansion, he says, is an overdue modernisation programme, rather than a response to any particular threat, including one from the United States. The programme to build the Tamandaré-class frigates was launched in 2017. Memorandums of understanding for the development of the Gripen with Saab were first signed in 2013. Both predate today's tension with the United States. The recent efforts have merely followed a string of failed attempts.

Brazil's success helps to make the case for more domestic defence procurement in future. The government is eager to build more military and naval hardware at home. Its original motive was to boost Brazil's industry. The question now is whether Brazil can sustain the existing programmes and the extra spending they require. Mr Bearne says success should protect the frigates from cuts. Even if Brazil has a different government after an election in October, a new right-wing one is unlikely to undermine a solid defence-manufacturing base. For the moment, the project seems to be on an even keel. ■

Earthquake in Colombia

Tale of two nations

QUIBDÓ

An uneven response to the tragedy

'THEY PULLED people out alive,' says Alberto, an onlooker, as a digger's steel teeth smash into a heap of concrete. It is all that remains of a four-storey building in Quibdó, a city in the western state of Chocó that was near the epicentre of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake which struck Colombia on August 10th. Aftershocks brought down more buildings. Around the country, at least 265 people have died.

The earthquake was as powerful as the deadly pair that devastated Venezuela in June. But it occurred about ten times deeper in the Earth's crust, reducing its destructive force. Crucially, too, the Colombian government reacted much faster than the Venezuelan regime. Abelardo de la Espriella, sworn in as president only three days before the tremors, assumed command of the situation.

Yet the earthquake has still highlighted local deprivation. Chocó is Colombia's poorest state. The hospital in Quibdó is the only place that offers even basic surgery. Bandits extort the poor population, 75% of whom are Afro-Colombian and 13% indigenous. Alberto complains about a lack of machinery: 'The municipality is in bad shape,' he says. Rescue teams started work on the morning of the 11th, but the end of a 72-hour window after the quake, reckoned to be the period when lives can be saved, has passed. Of the three people pulled out of the rubble, two have died. The people of Chocó, Alberto says, have

img-65.jpeg

Mr de la Espriella's first crisis

been 'abandoned by the state'.

This contrasts with the rescue efforts in the richer neighbouring region of Valle del Cauca. In Cali, its capital, 88 people have been rescued, with expert teams sent from Bogotá, the country's capital. Unlike in remote Chocó, it has been possible to bring aid overland to the hard-hit cities of Manizales and Pereira, where more than half of the deaths have been recorded so far (people in Chocó may have benefited from living in traditionally built wooden houses).

Mr de la Espriella seems aware of the disparities. His cabinet has been dispatched to the worst-affected areas. Speaking in Quibdó, he said that victims would receive temporary housing aid. Yet many families are wondering where that is. 'We have no water, no energy, no nothing,' says Rosa Mercedes, staring at the ruin of her apartment in Quibdó. 'No one has come to ask us what happened, to ask us how we are,' she says.

Reality bites

Colombia's new president also faces the problem of how to pay for recovery from the quake. He has declared an economic emergency, letting him spend the national budget by decree, bypassing Congress. His new government has inherited a mess in the key agency for natural-disaster response. The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management is cash-strapped after being robbed by corrupt politicians and functionaries over the past few years. Some talk of the country's population suffering as badly as it did in 1999 when an earthquake killed around 1,230 Colombians.

This earthquake has forced Mr de la Espriella to be more pragmatic than his campaign promises suggested he might be. He had previously vowed to shun Bogotá, home to what he calls the 'same as always' elites. But his talk of running things instead from his home city of Barranquilla, on the other side of the country from where the quake struck, now looks even more unwise. It is in the capital where ministries, big media outlets or international partners can be accessed.

He is paying, too, for his foolish refusal to co-operate with the handover process initiated by the previous government. That was a 'silly populist idea', says Luis Ernesto Gómez, a former interior vice-minister. Badmouthing Gustavo Petro, his leftist predecessor, was popular on social media. The erratic Mr Petro himself was posting with—if anything—even more ferocity.

This means the new government lacks information and capabilities that it urgently needs. The executive is having to act mostly through local governments. That just about works in wealthier places like the parts of the country that grow coffee, and Valle del Cauca. In Quibdó, Ms Mercedes is still waiting. ■

43

Middle East & Africa

img-66.jpeg

Somalia

From the ashes

MOGADISHU

Mogadishu no longer deserves its reputation for deadly violence

ONE EVENING six years ago Saakin Abdi, a young civil servant, enjoyed an ice-cream in central Mogadishu. Back then, residing in the Somali capital meant living with the knowledge that at any moment you could be the next victim of al-Shabab, al-Qaeda's richest and deadliest affiliate. The next evening, a friend of Ms Abdi's was in the same ice-cream parlour when a militant burst through the door and blew himself up. Her friend and six others were killed. They were among at least 320 people who died in al-Shabab attacks in the city in 2020.

Mogadishu has been synonymous with violence ever since Somalia's central state collapsed in the 1990s. Yet in recent years it has undergone a quiet transformation. Al-Shabab's attacks in the city have fallen from 144 in the third quarter of 2022, when Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took office as president, to just five in the second quarter of this year. Data collected by the Armed

Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a monitoring group, suggest the number of deaths in Mogadishu linked to al-Shabab is on track in 2026 to be the lowest since the group emerged in the mid-2000s (see chart on next page).

"This is the biggest achievement of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's administration," says Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank. Residents used to avoid venturing out after dark, because "al-Shabab, or those fighting it, might kill you," recalls Ms Abdi. Today, dozens of new cafés are open past mid-

night, thronged with young Somalis posting videos on TikTok and Instagram. On July 1st Mr Mohamud, who has survived multiple assassination attempts including one in Baidoa, the seat of government of South-West state, earlier this year, marked Somalia's independence day by giving an unprecedented public address at one of Mogadishu's most frequently targeted junctions. Hundreds joined him.

That is a marked change from the late 2010s, when "we never knew if we'd return home alive when we went out in the morning," recalls a Somali MP. An official says he survived six different explosions after joining the government in 2014. A lorry bomb in 2017 killed almost 600 people.

The fruits of better security are plain to see. "Business is booming," says Gamal Hassan, the commerce minister. New buildings are going up at a frenetic pace. The district around the airport, in particular, has grown much denser. Dahab Tower, a 26-floor confection of luxury flats, a mall, a gym and a mosque, is due to open this year. It sits close to the spot where, in 1993, the bodies of two American soldiers were dragged through the streets after militiamen shot down a Black Hawk helicopter. Nearby is Beydan Coffee, a thriving pan-African chain founded by a Somali who returned from Sweden in the 2010s.

What explains the lull in attacks is less

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

  • 44 Zambia's copper-fuelled election
  • 45 Egypt, Jordan and the Iran war
  • 46 A new Saudi-led defence pact
  • 47 The troubled Muslim Brothers

44 Middle East & Africa

Mogadishu's long road

Somalia, fatalities from attacks carried out by al-Shabab in Mogadishu*

img-67.jpeg

▶ obvious. The government boasts that, in the words of a former intelligence officer, it has "completely closed the doors" on al-Shabab. Mr Mahmood of the ICG credits "prosaic" measures such as the spread of CCTV cameras, and an electronic database that police equipped with iPads use to identify civilian cars at checkpoints. Plain-clothes intelligence officers have been deployed in large numbers.

Turkey, the staunchest foreign backer of Mr Mohamud's government, has played a big role. "It's the Turks," says a Western diplomat in Mogadishu, asked to explain improved security. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, the country has become Somalia's most important investor, with business interests including the airport and the port, a new spaceport and offshore oil-and-gas exploration, all clustered in or around the capital. Since Turkey opened its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu in 2017, its forces have trained Somali soldiers, conducted drone strikes and joined Somalia's national army in operations against al-Shabab.

How much this has weakened al-Shabab beyond the capital is unclear. Since Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, Turkish and Somali air strikes outside Mogadishu have been accompanied by the most intensive American aerial campaign in Somalia's history. Yet the federal government's territorial reach has barely budged in 18 months. Much of Mogadishu's hinterland remains under al-Shabab's control.

Some analysts suspect the group may be purposefully restraining itself. "Al-Shabab itself has changed its strategy and tactics," argues Afyare Abdi Elmi of City University of Mogadishu. Fewer mass-casualty attacks in the capital may be a bid to soften its image. Al-Shabab is benefiting from a status quo where it can extort businesses in the capital largely unchecked. For now, it may see little cause to step up attacks.

Yet there are several reasons to mistrust the calm. The first is a stand-off over delayed elections between the president and his rivals. In June brief clashes between the

army and militias linked to two opposition leaders killed at least 13 people.

Even more worrying is the president's escalating confrontation with Somalia's regional states. In March Mr Mohamud sent troops into Baidoa to depose the governor. In recent weeks he has been trying to mobilise local forces against the leadership of the northern state of Puntland. "They started well against al-Shabab in 2022," says Ahmed Koshin, a former defence official, of Mr Mohamud's government. "But since then they've put the state's resources into political infighting."

Those resources are shrinking. On July 1st America said it would no longer support UNSOS, the UN's logistics body responsible for supplying the African Union peacekeepers that have propped up the federal government since 2007. European sources say the EU will not plug the gap, leaving the peacekeeping mission in the lurch. Without an alternative, Mr Mahmood reckons it could fold as early as 2027.

Somali officials appear confident that the country's strategic position at one of the two gateways to the Red Sea means foreign partners will not step back entirely. A jihadist takeover of Mogadishu remains remote. But it would take much less to shatter the newfound sense of security. "You never know," says Ms Abdi. "It sometimes feels like things can go back." ■

Zambia's election

Keep digging

KITWE

High copper prices are a boon for the country. But voters want to feel it

IN ONE WAY or another, everyone is working the earth outside Kitwe, in Zambia's Copperbelt province. The local mine is back in business, boosted by record copper prices (see chart). But that means little to the women weeding their onions outside. "We don't know where they take the money," says one, gesturing at the mine gate. Historically, the rate at which growth translates into poverty reduction has been lower in Zambia than almost anywhere else in the world.

The cost of living will have been on voters' minds when they voted for a president on August 13th. Many feel burdened by high prices, despite falling inflation and a stronger kwacha. Their frustration energised the campaign of Brian Mundubile, the main challenger, who describes himself as an elder brother to the disenchanted young. The incumbent, Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND), probably has enough sup-

Growing riches

Copper, $'000 per metric tonne

img-68.jpeg

port to win a second term (results are expected on August 17th). But he has also tilted the playing field in his favour, using tactics he once decried.

Mr Hichilema spent years in opposition, facing spurious charges of treason, before his triumph in 2021. One of Zambia's richest businessmen, he presented himself as the man to fix an economic crisis. His government has restructured unpayable debts, cut subsidies, boosted reserves and kept the IMF happy. It has also reduced the tax bill of the copper industry, which accounts for two-thirds of exports. The reforms have "poised us for growth", purrs Sokwani Chilembo, chief executive of the Zambia Chamber of Mines.

That growth is slower than the government promised. An ambitious production target of 3m tonnes a year by 2031 will surely be missed (last year's output was about 890,000 tonnes). Not for want of buyers. China is revamping a railway to the Indian Ocean. Western countries are backing a transport corridor to the Atlantic. Zambia does not want to pick sides, and has rebuffed American attempts to link mineral access to health assistance. "Common sense is that you don't put all your eggs in one basket," says Situmbeko Musokotwane, the finance minister.

With copper in such demand, could more of the gains be kept in the country? Many Zambians think so. Some allege that Mr Hichilema is soft on foreign-owned mining companies because he is secretly funded by them (which his aides and the mining companies deny). He has abolished fees in state schools and allocated more money to local government, both highly popular moves, but still struggles to shake off his elitist image.

In other ways, he has had a makeover: the man who stood up for Zambian democracy from a jail cell is now weakening it from State House. Repression is not quite as thuggish as it was under the Patriotic Front (PF) government of the 2010s, when Zambia began its authoritarian slide. Gone are the cadres at markets and bus ▶

Middle East & Africa 45

► stations who used to shake down passers-by. Instead, citizens worry that a critical Facebook post could result in arrest under cyber-crime laws. “Institutions still act the way they acted under the PF,” says Josiah Kalala of Chapter One, a pressure group.

The PF itself did not field a candidate after struggling with internal divisions and state interference. Mr Mundubile, a former PF politician, galvanised old followers behind a new brand. On the campaign trail, he was obstructed by UPND supporters throwing stones; he says that some of his sympathisers were arrested. He draws much of his support from the north and east. Mr Hichilema draws his from the south and west. The main battleground is in the towns, where ethnic ties are weaker.

Zambian democracy has life in it yet, and a surprise is not impossible. Whoever wins will need to find answers to long-standing economic questions. Nearly two-thirds of Zambians live on less than $2.15 a day; only five countries have a higher poverty rate, and they are all either in conflict or have much less money to go round. After two years of good harvests, the return of El Niño now brings the threat of drought. The last time it happened, in 2024, low inflows at hydroelectric dams cut power to just a few hours a day. The task for the next president is to take the copper boom beyond the mine gates. ■

Egypt and Jordan

The stuck-in-the-middle men

DUBAI

War in the Gulf has weakened two of America’s Arab allies

NEARLY TWO years ago King Abdullah of Jordan told Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, that his own country would not be a “battleground for regional conflicts”. A decade earlier, while campaigning to be Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi made the opposite vow to Gulf states: should their security be threatened, Egypt would be “one step away”.

Yet today Jordan is at the centre of a regional conflict between America, its closest ally, and Mr Araghchi’s government. As for Egypt, it may be one step away—but it has stayed there. Though the Gulf faces its greatest threat in 35 years, Mr Sisi has offered little beyond words.

The broken promises are revealing. Jordan is paying a price for a war over which it has little control. Egypt has been sidelined as a mediator and military power. They have long sold themselves as pillars of the regional order. But the order looks wobbly—and both countries look lost.

img-69.jpeg

From asset to liability

Surrounded by stronger neighbours and bereft of natural resources, Jordan views close ties with America as the key to its survival. In return, America has made it one of its largest recipients of foreign aid. Thousands of American troops are deployed at air bases such as Muwaffaq Salti (pictured), which host fighter jets, aerial-refuelling tankers and other warplanes vital to the war with Iran.

Hosting them made Jordan a target for Iran. It is also unpopular. Hundreds of politicians, retired army officers and other prominent Jordanians recently signed an open letter calling for American troops to leave. Yet the king cannot afford to comply. Last year Jordan received more than $1.6bn of American aid (3% of GDP). This month America pledged another $355m.

Jordan needs that money as the war batters its economy. Missile attacks forced flight cancellations and scared off visitors; tourism revenue, already whacked by the war in Gaza, has fallen again. Jordan relies on natural gas from Israel for half of its electricity. Israel suspended exports when the war began, fearing Iranian strikes on its rigs. That forced Jordan to switch to diesel, heavy fuel oil and spot cargoes of liquefied natural gas. Though exports resumed in April, the IMF expects Jordan’s energy-import bill to be 36% higher than in 2025.

Iran has tried to deepen a schism between the king and the public. Even as its missiles and drones hit the kingdom, it claims it has “no hostility” towards the Jordanian people and that America, not Iran, has “violated your territorial integrity”. Such appeals may find little purchase: many Jordanians view Iran as a threat. Still, the war is a dilemma for a government struggling with domestic discontent.

Egypt’s economy is holding up better. It is expected to grow by 4.6% this year. The

IMF has just unlocked the latest $1.8bn tranche of a four-year loan agreement. Tourism, which accounts for 13% of jobs, remains strong. More than 9m people visited Egypt in the first half of this year, a 3% increase on the same period in 2025.

At first glance Egypt’s other big sources of hard currency, revenue from the Suez Canal and remittances, look solid as well. The former rose to $2.4bn in the first half of 2026, up from $1.8bn in the same period in 2025. The latter reached a record high in the year to June. Both could be lagging indicators, however. Iran-backed attacks on shipping in the Red Sea could dent canal revenue. As for remittances, a lot comes from Egyptians in the Gulf. A prolonged slump there would mean fewer workers to send money. Meanwhile, the government has raised some electricity tariffs by 12%.

For now, though, Egypt’s biggest weakness is status, not solvency. After the Hamas-led massacre in Israel on October 7th 2023, Mr Sisi was in high demand. His spy chiefs have a long relationship with the Hamas leadership in Gaza, owing to their shared border. Antony Blinken, America’s previous secretary of state, visited Egypt seven times in the year after the massacre, more than any other country bar Israel. The final negotiations for a ceasefire took place in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025.

Egypt has been far less relevant in the war with Iran. It has been eclipsed as a mediator by Pakistan, Turkey and Gulf states. Nor has the Arab world’s largest army done much to defend its neighbours—even though the Gulf has given Egypt tens of billions of dollars in aid since Mr Sisi seized power in a coup in 2013.

Officials in Cairo argue that Gulf states are receiving help from other allies, and that Egypt has other threats on its borders. ►

46 Middle East & Africa

► Still, its inaction has irked its friends. In March Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), complained about “major” Arab countries sitting idle. “Where are you today in a time of hardship?” he asked.

Egypt did deploy a squadron of Rafale fighter jets to the UAE—although it only announced this in May, a month after an initial ceasefire between America and Iran took effect. It was noticeably absent on August 7th, when Saudi Arabia signed a

mutual-defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey, although Saudi officials suggest it could join later. Yet staying out of the war has not bought it protection. Last month a drone struck a natural-gas facility in Damietta, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast.

The tripartite pact is a glimpse of the Middle East’s future. Fearing they can no longer rely on America, regional countries will need to take more responsibility for their own defence. That will be an uncomfortable place for Egypt and Jordan. ■

Alliances in the Middle East

Three’s a crowd

ISTANBUL AND JERUSALEM

What to make of a new Saudi-led defence pact

ONE BOASTS NATO’s second-largest army and a booming defence sector. Another is the Muslim world’s only nuclear power. And the third is the world’s eighth-biggest arms spender. No wonder that Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia made a splash on August 7th when they signed a defence pact, especially after officials said it included a mutual-defence clause similar to NATO’s Article 5. “Any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all,” said Pakistan’s foreign ministry.

The three powers stress that other regional powers are welcome to join the pact, batting away suggestions of a Sunni military bloc in the making. But the religious symbolism was laid on thick at the signing, attended by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pakistan’s prime minister,

Shehbaz Sharif, and their host, Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince (pictured). Instead of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the ceremony took place in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. Afterwards, the three leaders prayed at the city’s Grand Mosque.

One purpose of the deal is to act as a counterweight to Israeli influence. The rapid succession of Israeli military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, the attack that killed Hamas negotiators in Qatar, and a sense that Israel’s appetite for regional dominance is not yet sated, have set off alarms across the Middle East. Such concerns are most acute in Turkey, which some Israeli politicians and officials have described as a threat on a par with Iran.

Meeting the threat from Iran itself is another key aim. Though badly hobbled, its regime has proved capable of wreaking

havoc across the region when under attack, especially in the Gulf. It has also shown how much leverage it wields by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. “Using Hormuz against regional countries has become one of the pillars of Iran’s new strategy,” says Murat Yesiltas, the head of SETA, a think-tank close to Mr Erdogan’s government. The three signatories “will not target Iran”, says Mr Yesiltas, “but they want to show collective deterrence.” Iran said it saw no reason to fear the pact.

The deal also reflects mounting concerns about American priorities and the credibility of its security guarantees. Turkey, like other NATO members, is worried about the risk of a broader American pullback from both Europe and the Middle East. Saudi confidence in America was shaken after Iran made large holes in the air-defence umbrella that America has helped spread over the Gulf.

Israel’s government has not responded publicly to news of the pact, but the announcement was greeted with dismay there. The country already sees Turkey and Pakistan as hostile powers and resents the cosy relations their leaders have fostered with America’s president, Donald Trump. The pact also underscores how remote the prospect of normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia remains. “It will have to wait until there is a new government in Israel,” says an Israeli diplomat, “and even then, it will take time.”

The chances that any of the deal’s signatories would actually intervene on behalf of the others appear slim. Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not come to Pakistan’s defence if war with India broke out; Pakistan or Turkey would not respond in kind to Iranian missile launches against Saudi Arabia. For the time being, says Mr Yesiltas, the pact is less a muscular military alliance than a platform for security and defence co-operation. Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets and procurement needs, Turkey’s defence sector and Pakistan’s military-industrial base make for a potent combination. Turkish defence tech firms in particular are rubbing their hands. Baykar, a Turkish drone-maker, signed a landmark contract with Saudi Arabia in 2023. Pakistan used Turkish drones during its conflict with India last year.

But Turkey is hungry for more. Its defence projects, including an indigenous fighter jet known as the KAAN, a new “Steel Dome” air-defence system, and long-range ballistic missiles, are expected to cost tens of billions of dollars. Turkey’s economy, plagued by inflation that continues to hover above 30%, cannot shoulder that cost alone. Saudi defence contracts and investments would go a long way to help fund the plans, says Caglar Kurc, a Turkish analyst. That may be where the Mecca Agreement pays its first dividends. ■

img-70.jpeg

Allies in Mecca

Middle East & Africa 47

img-71.jpeg

Political Islam

Down, but never out

BEIRUT

Across the Middle East the Muslim Brotherhood is ailing but alive

THE HEAT inside Mornaguia prison, on the edge of Tunis, climbed past 50°C this summer. On July 17th Rachid Ghannouchi, the 85-year-old founder of Ennahda, the Tunisian political party inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, passed out in his cell. His story seems destined to end like that of Muhammad Morsi, the Brotherhood figure elected as president of Egypt in 2012, only to die in prison in 2019.

Mr Ghannouchi's fate illustrates the declining influence of his ideological comrades across the Middle East. A decade and a half ago parties associated with the Brotherhood held the presidency of Egypt and a plurality of seats in Tunisia's parliament. Its triumphal message was pumped out to the Arab masses by Qatar's popular Al Jazeera television channel. The group seemed the early winner of the Arab spring that erupted in Tunisia in late 2010 and spread through the Arab world in 2011.

But autocracies soon reimposed themselves. In the years that followed, the Brotherhood's leaders were imprisoned or scattered into exile. The past year has been especially punishing. In November Donald Trump told his administration to designate the group's various chapters as terrorists. On January 13th it listed the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as 'global terrorists' for aiding Hamas, which grew out of the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch; the Lebanese version was officially deemed a

'foreign terrorist' organisation. In May, under a new American counter-terrorism strategy, the Brotherhood was included alongside al-Qaeda and Islamic State as a wellspring of modern jihadism. Jordan banned the group completely in April 2025 and has since curbed its political wing, the Islamic Action Front.

It is unclear which bit of the fractious Brotherhood America is targeting. There have been two main factions since 2021, when Ibrahim Munir, running the group from exile in London, dissolved its structures in Turkey, as Mahmoud Hussein, the movement's secretary-general, claimed that Mr Munir had himself been deposed. Each faction now has its own leader, its own Shura council and its own website; each insists it alone is the real thing.

Salah Abdel Haq, who took over Mr Munir's faction after the latter's death in 2022, has promised to contest the American designation in American courts. But the branch in Istanbul has let it be known that it does not consider its parent organisation qualified to answer for anyone. Even as they face an existential crisis, the two halves cannot speak with a single voice.

Mr Hussein of the Turkish branch controls the property, investment companies in Turkey and the cash, whereas Mr Abdel Haq stakes a claim to run the transnational organisation but has little to show for it. Former members have urged both men to

drop politics and revert to preaching.

In Egypt, the movement's ancestral heartland, its period in power is being scrubbed from official memory. Muhammad Badie, the movement's 'supreme guide' in Egypt, is in prison. On religious holidays President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issues pardons—but rarely for the Brothers. He has shut down the businesses that once sustained their welfare programme. Tunisia's president, Qais Saeed, is emulating Mr Sisi by jailing Mr Ghannouchi.

In Gaza Israel has pounded Hamas, which remains a close ideological associate, into the Mediterranean sand. Its territory has been all but destroyed, while Israeli hit squads hunt Hamas's leaders across the region. Though Hamas clings on, its power has shrivelled. Many Gazans have turned against it.

Syria is another site of humiliation. When the Assad regime fell in 2024, it was Sunni jihadists who took Damascus, not the Brotherhood. It had spent the war dithering and found itself outflanked by the men who did the fighting. It is almost absent from Syria's new parliament. Ahmed Zeidan, an adviser to President Ahmed al-Sharaa with long-standing Brotherhood ties, has suggested that its Syrian branch should fold itself up. Writing for Al Jazeera, Abdulrahman al-Haj, a Syrian expert on Islamist groups, argues that political Islam is no longer so relevant in the new Syria.

Perhaps so. But it has long been unwise to write the Brotherhood off. It was dissolved in 1948 and crushed again by Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt's leader, in 1954. Its chief theorist, Sayyid Qutb, was hanged in 1966. The group spent most of the next four decades outlawed, yet its followers still took 88 seats in Egypt's parliament in 2005 and won the presidency after a democratic election in 2012. 'They are just excellent at weathering the storm,' says a Western intelligence official in the region.

Repression can officially efface the organisation. But it does not remove the reasons people join it. In Egypt, those reasons are as sharp as ever. The country's shoddy economy survives on IMF handouts and Gulf deposits. Its young graduates are as grumpily underemployed as they were in 2010. Tunisia, too, is as badly off as it was when it sparked the Arab spring.

Israel's war in Gaza has left Arab governments looking impotent or complicit. With the strip destroyed, the Brotherhood's founding claim—that the Arab world's humiliation is spiritual before it is material—still makes sense to many of the region's aggrieved. The Brotherhood laid its roots with social-welfare programmes and a strong appeal to Arab dignity, both sorely lacking among leaders across the Middle East. When the group turns 100 in March 2028, expect it to be alive and kicking, however divided its leadership. ■

ECONOMIST ENTERPRISE

img-72.jpeg

No two businesses are alike. Why should their AI be?

img-73.jpeg

Scan to find out more: insights.economistenterprise.com/tech-frontiers

How AI changes work—and the skills people need.

Artificial intelligence is transforming how people work. It automates routine tasks, freeing humans to focus on activities that require creativity and judgment. But it also risks redefining classical roles or wiping out jobs entirely. How should organisations redesign employment and workflows to benefit from the technology?

Tech Frontiers, an initiative from Economist Enterprise, pairs original research and events, bringing leaders together to rethink work in the age of intelligent machines.

Tech Frontiers is supported by organisations including

Infosys pwc rubrik

Economist Enterprise is the business-to-business division of The Economist Group. It operates independently of The Economist.

49

Asia

img-74.jpeg

India

One law to bind them all

DEHRADUN

The ruling party's apparently liberal argument would make all Indians marry, divorce and inherit like Hindus

AFTER RETURNING from sunset prayers in the mosque next door, Khursheed Ahmed shoos away his all-male entourage to talk to a female journalist. The 71-year-old community leader is glum. A law he spent months unsuccessfully campaigning against has put him in a quandary. How, he wonders, can a person be both a God-fearing Muslim and a law-abiding Indian? "If you don't follow sharia, you are not a Muslim," he says. But since January 2025 it has been illegal for Muslims in Mr Ahmed's home state of Uttarakhand to obey many of their customary family laws.

This is what awaits much of India. Uttarakhand, up in the Himalaya, was the first state in independent India to be subject to a uniform civil code (UCC), meant to apply to almost all its citizens regardless of creed. The code aims to replace religion-

based personal laws with a single rulebook for marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption. So far this year, codes that are in essence identical have been passed by legislators in the states of Assam, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, though none is yet in force; another five states are planning to follow. If West Bengal passes its own law, as expected this month, close to 30m more Muslims will face Mr Ahmed's dilemma.

All the states passing a UCC into law are

ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu-nationalist outfit that runs the country and many of its states. It took over West Bengal after state elections in April. The BJP presents the new codes as a matter of universal human rights, in particular women's rights. But look more closely and what is actually going on is a process of imposing on religious minorities the laws and customs that Hindus already follow.

The basic principle looks fair and simple: every Indian should follow the same law. The reason they do not goes back to the trauma of partition. After the departing British split India into a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India in 1947, India's Hindus wanted to soothe the anxieties of the new country's minorities. They drew up a constitution that let religious groups, including Muslims, govern their own civil matters.

No longer. The universal codes extend to Muslim daughters the same equal inheritance rights that Hindu daughters won in 2005. They criminalise polygamy for Muslim men. Talk to Muslim women in Uttarakhand and many are pleased to see such fixes. That makes it easy to dismiss critics as conservative cranks. "Hard-core Islamists think you cannot tinker with God's"

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

50 The Rohingyas' harsh exile

51 Smog in South-East Asia

51 Japan revamps its spy agencies

52 Ashoka: Venice v Osaka

50 Asia

► will," says Shatrughna Singh, a Hindu, who sat on Uttarakhand's drafting committee and now oversees the law's roll-out there.

But the reality is that the codes are not an instrument of women's liberation, or indeed liberalism of any kind. One of the Uttarakhand code's provision, for instance, requires all couples to register a live-in relationship with the state within 30 days or risk a prison sentence. State and party officials insist that the aim is to protect women from exploitative men by bringing informal liaisons out of the shadows. But many lovers avoid a formal set-up precisely to protect themselves from prying eyes—especially those in unconventional relationships, say, between castes or creeds. The code potentially makes the relationship everyone's business. Under some versions of it, faith leaders, parents and even the general public can object and block couples from shacking up.

Nor do the new codes pick the most woman-friendly bits from India's varying traditions. Take Muslim personal law. Under its dictates, women can generally escape toxic marriages faster than Hindu wives can. And they are also protected by mehr, a payment that a husband-to-be must make at the time of marriage to ensure his wife's financial independence. Yet Uttarakhand's all-Hindu UCC drafting committee "basically copy-pasted" what used to be Hindu personal laws and imposed them on religious minorities, says Saumya Saxena, a legal scholar at India's Jindal Global University.

The UCC does nothing to correct injustices in Hindu law that still often exclude widows, wives and mothers from inheriting ancestral property. It draws no inspiration from India's tribal communities, which often treat women best of all; tribal communities (who, note critics, often vote BJP) are excluded from the codes.

When Uttarakhand officials face a foreign audience, they make sure to call the law "progressive" and "secular". But religion quickly intrudes on their logic when they explain why the code was first tried out in Uttarakhand, where the BJP has ruled for most of the state's 25-year history. The state, which floods with pilgrims at this time of year, is as holy to Hindus as Jerusalem is to Jews, they say. They claim the Muslim population is exploding and mutter about an "expansionary mindset" that drives Muslim men to marry many wives, supposedly to outbreed Hindus.

On the surface, Uttarakhand's experiment seems largely symbolic. The first criminal case under the new law came only this April, when a woman objected to her husband's attempt to make use of halala, an archaic Muslim divorce custom. As of early July, fewer than 100 couples in a state of 12m people had formally fessed up to their live-in relationship. But over time, the

law may push Muslims even further from the mainstream. Mr Ahmed advises fellow Muslims to shun courtrooms and to quietly fix disputes within the community. That might end up increasing divergence rather than removing it.

Uttarakhand was only a practice round for the BJP's dream of making India a Hindu nation. In the conservative Hindu state, resistance to the new laws was muted and their roll-out uneventful. Now Uttarakhand's Mr Singh has a new job sitting on the drafting committee in West Bengal. It is close to 30% Muslim, roughly twice the national average, and famous for its always vibrant and often violent politics. Until May it was one of the few states that had never been ruled by the BJP. When the assembly starts to debate its own new civil code, some observers fear unrest. ■

The Rohingyas

Seeking refuge from refuge

KUALA LUMPUR

Refugees from Myanmar are living in fear in Malaysia

"I DON'T WANT to go out any more. I stay home most of the time, I want to leave Malaysia so badly." So says Nur Sadek, a Rohingya refugee and community organiser who arrived in the country from Myanmar nearly five years ago. Mr Sadek shares messages from strangers threatening him with violence, some naming places where he can be found. One stranger sent him a video showing a rifle being fired.

Life in Malaysia has never been good for Rohingyas—a Muslim minority viciously persecuted in Myanmar who have

long sought refuge elsewhere in South-East Asia, often arriving in rickety boats. The UN officially counts more than 100,000 of them in the country, though the true number is doubtless higher. They do not live in refugee camps, but nor do they enjoy many rights. They are not allowed to seek formal employment and their children cannot study in Malaysian schools.

Recently matters have been greatly worsened by a hate campaign that has gained strength on Malaysian social media. In May viral posts accused refugees of improper disposal of the remains of animals slaughtered during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. In June a post falsely claimed that more than 2m babies had been born to couples combining a Rohingya and a Malay (feeding on old worries that the foreigners are snapping up local women and having babies who become citizens). Another post pictured a fictitious (AI-generated) "President of Rohingya Malaysia", supposedly demanding that an entire town be set aside for Rohingyas to live in. The Malaysians who shared that one included the daughter of the deputy prime minister.

Ten years ago Malaysians were more welcoming. When large numbers of Rohingyas began fleeing military clearances in Rakhine state in 2017 (which the UN has described as a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing"), many Malaysians were willing to stick up for them. These days Malaysians are feeling squeezed by rising living costs and economic mismanagement. Refugees make handy scapegoats.

The online vitriol has real-world impacts. In June and July at least nine informal schools teaching Rohingya children in Malaysia were closed, either by authorities (for being unlicensed) or by staff who had grown concerned about their safety; one teacher says he has told children not to ►

img-75.jpeg

Better than the alternative

Asia 51

► walk in groups. Malaysia's government now routinely turns away or detains Rohingyas' boats. The police recently held over 100 Rohingya refugees who had travelled to UN offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, following a reported eviction. On July 29th Malaysia announced plans to send some 5,000 Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, where their lives may be at risk. Anand Raj, president of the Malaysian bar, warns that such deportations are "neither humane nor a viable option".

Rohingyas will doubtless keep trying to reach Malaysia, no matter how bad things get there. Some 6,500 Rohingyas are known to have attempted the voyage by boat last year, up from 4,300 in 2023 and 2,400 back in 2020. Says one refugee in Malaysia: "If we didn't flee we would have been killed." ■

South-East Asia

Under a cloud

SINGAPORE

As the region braces for more smoke, has it learned from past crises?

IN 2015, AS South-East Asia was engulfed in toxic smog caused by fires in Indonesia, Jusuf Kalla, the country's vice-president at the time, suggested that his neighbours needed a change in perspective. "For 11 months they enjoyed nice air from Indonesia and they never thanked us," he said. South-East Asians flocked to a satirical website created to express gratitude to Indonesia. The site has registered more than 34m votes of sarcastic thanks.

That number may soon grow. Fears of another severe haze are rising as fires rage in Indonesia. Weather-watchers estimate that the number of blazes detected across the island of Borneo in the first 12 days of August alone exceeds the figure registered during the entire month in each of the past seven years (see chart). The smoke is already forcing officials to act. In Pontianak, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, schools have shut. In neighbouring Sarawak, in Malaysia, officials urged people to stay indoors. Singapore has put its own responders on standby.

Meteorologists fear that much worse is to come. El Niño, a weather pattern associated with unusually warm waters in the Pacific, tends to cause drier conditions in the region. This increases the chance of fires, especially on Indonesia's peatlands, where the carbon-rich soil is more combustible and where fires smouldering underground are hard to extinguish. Many climatologists think that this year's El Niño will turn out to be the strongest yet, raising con-

concerns about a haze episode comparable to the one in 2015.

That would be a disaster. The smog in 2015 caused some 100,000 excess deaths in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, according to one study. But there was also a heavy economic toll: the World Bank put Indonesia's losses at $16.1bn, almost 2% of GDP. Economies in the region are already vulnerable, having been hit to varying degrees by the war in Iran.

That war could also contribute to the haze. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up fuel and fertiliser costs, prompting the Indonesian government to mandate greater use of biofuels. This, in turn, is driving up the demand for palm oil, putting pressure on farmers and plantation companies to clear more land with fire.

The region may be better prepared than it was a decade ago. Better satellite monitoring has improved forecasts. A centre in Singapore tracks fires and smoke across the region and provides early warnings, allowing governments to implement public-health measures. In April ASEAN, the regional bloc, inaugurated the secretariat of a new haze-control centre in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, which seeks to improve coordination between governments.

But for all the machinery of regional cooperation, it still lacks much bite. ASEAN has had an agreement on transboundary haze since 2002, but implementation and enforcement rest with national governments. Its fund to pay for anti-haze resources, such as water-bombing aircraft and other firefighting equipment, relies on voluntary contributions and remains small.

Ultimately, the severity of haze-related problems this year will depend on what happens in Indonesia. After the disaster of 2015, Joko Widodo, then the president, made prevention a priority. His successor, Prabowo Subianto, has kept much of that emphasis. Last year he created a new department to tackle blazes, and strengthened patrols, aerial surveillance and emergency teams. In the coming weeks, they face trial by fire. ■

Worrying signs

South-East Asia*, fires detected in August†, '000

img-76.jpeg

*Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei †A proxy measure calculated using satellite imagery ‡To August 12th Source: ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre

Japan

Spy time

TOKYO

Japan's long-overdue revamp of its intelligence services

APHOTOGRAPH OF a wooden plaque with handwritten characters marked the launch of Japan's new "National Intelligence Bureau" (NIB) on July 31st. It was an appropriately understated reveal for a big overhaul of Japanese spookery.

Japan's intelligence apparatus has long been fragmented and feeble. Since the country's defeat in the second world war, legal and political constraints have made it hard to counter adversaries snooping around inside Japan and to run human intelligence (HUMINT) operations abroad. Japan's prime minister, Takaichi Sanae, calls the creation of the NIB, along with the establishment of a new National Intelligence Council, the first steps of broader reforms necessary to navigate an increasingly dangerous world.

Japan was once a formidable intelligence player. During the Russo-Japanese war in the early 20th century, Japanese forces cracked codes, ran agents across the Far East and funded anti-tsarist agitators in Europe; during the second world war, "special duty units" undertook covert actions across Asia.

But following Japan's defeat, the imperial architecture was largely demolished. Attempts to establish a new centralised intelligence service faced severe resistance from a public that remembered imperial-era secret police all too well; many Japanese leaders were happy to rely upon America for intelligence, as they did for security more broadly. Japan's own intelligence activities were spread across discrete departments at the foreign, defence and justice ministries as well as the police agency. The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO), nominally the highest intelligence body in the country, lacked the authority to manage the fragmented agencies. As one Japanese official grumbled in the early 2000s, compared with America's CIA, Japan's CIRO was "about the equal of a nursery school".

The latest reforms are intended to help Japan's intelligence community grow up fast. The first phase involves "getting the structure right", says Richard Samuels, author of "Special Duty", a history of Japanese intelligence. The new bureau, an upgraded version of the CIRO, will have the authority to consolidate information from across the disparate ministries and generate synthesised analyses. Meanwhile, the intelligence council, which the prime min-

52 Asia

► ister personally heads, gives political leaders the ability to set intelligence strategy and to integrate findings into policymaking. The next planned steps include passing an anti-espionage law to beef up counter-intelligence, and creating a new foreign-intelligence agency to conduct operations abroad.

Though such reforms have been discussed for decades, the process has accelerated in recent years. Growing threats from China, Russia and North Korea have

sharpened minds, while increasing anxiety about American reliability has heightened the urgency over developing home-grown capabilities. Ms Takaichi made intelligence reform a pillar of her political platform. As the memory of the wartime era has faded, so too has public opposition to new security institutions.

For the reforms to succeed, Japan needs to overcome several long-standing problems. First, says Kotani Ken of Nihon University in Tokyo, are the bureaucratic

“turf battles” among the producers of intelligence. The second issue is the relative lack of sophistication of Japan’s consumers of intelligence. The country’s politicians are “not used to utilising intelligence in policymaking”, Mr Kotani notes.

In its own recommendations, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party calls on Diet members to be more proactive, rather than acting like customers “passively ordering omakase [an instruction to leave the choice to the chef] at a sushi restaurant.” ■

ASHOKA Art of the state

Why India triumphed at Venice and flopped in Osaka

THE KINDEST thing that can be said about India’s pavilion at the Osaka World Expo last year is that it was authentic. It opened more than two weeks late. It was chaotic. Its displays of ancient temples and ancient paintings looked like something from an ancient tourism-promotion advert. And, naturally, it included “inspiring talks and speeches” by Narendra Modi. As one Japanese visitor who lives in India put it, “The disorganised parts...were very Indian, so if you want to feel the vibe of India, I definitely recommend you go.”

So it was with some apprehension that this columnist stood at the threshold of the India pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, which runs until November. This was India’s first appearance at the world’s pre-eminent contemporary art show since 2019. On that occasion the government had instructed curators to take inspiration from the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. It was a theme that only a bureaucrat could have dreamed up: unoriginal, unimaginative and above all unlikely to get anyone into trouble (the art itself was praised). This year’s effort was overseen by the same ministry—of culture—that mounted the Osaka debacle.

Ashoka need not have worried. The pavilion is a triumph. Curated by Amin Jaffer, director of the Al Thani Collection in Paris, it brings together five artists to consider the meaning of home as India undergoes a dramatic physical transformation. Two works steal the show. Sumakshi Singh’s “Permanent Address” recreates in delicate silk, cotton and nylon her grandparents’ home in Delhi, since demolished to make way for something new—a familiar story in every Indian city. And Asim Waqif’s magnificent “Chaal”, a tangle of hundreds of

gigantic stalks of bamboo, nods to the ubiquitous scaffolding material of a country permanently under construction.

The result is a show that does expertly what Osaka did hamfistedly. It draws on India’s traditions, in this case crafts and local materials, and ties them to the country’s modern condition. Its achievement is to represent India in a way that feels authentic—this time for the right reasons. Reviews have been gushing. India features in several lists of pavilions not to miss.

How does the same ministry, working under the same political masters, produce such divergent results just one year apart? The easy answer is that the official in charge changed in the interim. The Indian state produces lumpy outcomes because so much of it depends on individual capabilities rather than institutional processes. But a more substantive answer lies in what Vivek Aggarwal, the newish secretary of culture, actually did. Namely, less.

The Osaka project was top-down. It was awarded to a private firm, cancelled without public explanation and then executed by the culture ministry’s own

arts body. The Venice pavilion was a collaboration between the government and two of India’s leading art institutions. The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, a lavishly funded and superbly connected organisation in Mumbai, brought its influence and expertise. Serendipity Arts, a non-profit best known for its annual festival in Goa, handled programming. The government dealt with paperwork, logistics and the inevitable extra costs. Some 12 tonnes of bamboo for Mr Waqif’s work had to be airlifted to Venice after the Iran war disrupted shipping.

Mr Aggarwal’s background is in finance and infrastructure, which may have helped. He knew what he did not know. The government trusted its partners, leaving decisions about art to the art people. Its only real demand was that the show represent a diversity of voices. Though pavilions with a single artist tend to be more coherent, it wanted artists from different regions and working in different indigenous mediums. Other than that it granted Mr Jaffer complete artistic freedom.

The success at Venice has encouraged the culture ministry to reaffirm its commitment to public-private partnerships. Mr Aggarwal says he has already written to Venice about reserving a space for the next art biennale in 2028. He is planning a big arts event in Delhi later this year, roping in galleries and foundations, and a revamp of how India’s hundreds of historical monuments are managed. The idea is to make heritage and the arts bigger contributors to the economy. The Indian state too often tries to do too much with too little. On the rare occasion that it trusts Indians to deploy their ample talents, the results are dazzling. ■

img-77.jpeg

53

China

img-78.jpeg

Mental health and treatment

Help wanted

BEIJING

Care is patchy and uneven, but the government wants change

HALF OF XIAO YAO'S clients, who are mostly women aged between 20 and 40, do not tell their parents that they pay 500 yuan ($75) for counselling sessions. The 33-year-old psychological counsellor says that older generations tend to take mental health less seriously and ask: "This is just unhappiness, isn't it? Aren't you overthinking things?"

In a highly competitive society that has undergone deep economic and social change, many Chinese struggle with mental health. A new study shows a surge over the past three decades in mental illness. And though more sufferers now seek help, psychiatric services remain limited. Meanwhile a nascent therapy sector is largely unregulated and often hard to afford.

The study, published in the Lancet, a British medical journal, offers the most comprehensive estimate to date of mental disorders' prevalence in China, with 1910 cases in 2023 (equivalent to about one in

seven Chinese). That was 46% more than in 1990, but after allowing for the country being older and more populous, the estimated prevalence was 14.6% higher. Because these are modelled estimates, based on sometimes sparse data and diagnoses, these figures are likely to be an underestimate of the true picture. Anxiety and depression are the most common illnesses, while eating disorders have grown at the fastest rate (see chart on next page).

Though social stigma and a reluctance to acknowledge mental illness have long prevailed, calls for help are growing. The pandemic marked a turning-point, says Li Zhang of the University of California, Davis, author of a book on anxiety and

psychotherapy in China. Lockdowns led to spikes in depression and anxiety; people grew more sympathetic to others suffering from mental illness and more accepting of their own problems, Ms Zhang says.

During the pandemic, many Chinese sought counselling for the first time. Unable to leave home, with the therapist's sofa out of bounds, they jumped straight to the screen. Self-help and psychological services have boomed online. Tens of millions use apps selling counselling sessions and other courses. Many also take advantage of free resources: new government hotlines for psychological support got more than 700,000 calls in 2025 and 900,000 in the first half of this year.

Another paper in the Lancet, in 2021, found that of 1,007 Chinese surveyed with a depressive disorder, just 9.5% got treatment, while a mere 0.5% were treated adequately. The government now aims to build a nationwide system of psychological support and crisis intervention by 2030, giving more people access to drug-based treatments and psychotherapy. Plans include counselling rooms in every school, psychiatric services in at least one hospital in every county and more mental-health professionals.

Fears of social instability inform some of the official urgency. In June a private pilot crashed into Beijing's tallest tower, ▶

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

54 Zhu Rongji dies at 97

55 Chaguan: Safety theatre

54 China

► killing himself, a rare security breach in the capital. Investigators claim the man suffered from anxiety and suicidal thoughts. In 2024 a spate of violent attacks, including vehicle rammings and stabbings against members of the public, was a source of official concern about mental health. Experts described the attacks as revenge on society, committed by men angry about their financial situation or perceived unfairness towards them. The Communist Party, with its mania for lists and slogans, stepped up the monitoring of “four-lack and five-loss” individuals, ie, those with no spouse, children, job or assets; or suffering from investment failures, life setbacks, relationship conflicts, emotional imbalance or mental disorders.

China’s very low rates of identifying and treating mental illness may at last be improving. Yuan Chengmei of Shanghai Mental Health Centre (SMHC), a top mental-health hospital, points to greater public awareness and better identification of milder cases of mental distress. Yet problems of capacity, affordability and sound regulation remain. China has far fewer psychotherapists per head of population than the West. Dr Yuan says that even SMHC, with a much higher concentration of qualified staff than elsewhere in China, struggles to keep up with growing demand. One response at SMHC has been to institute more group counselling.

Elsewhere, however, counselling is a free-for-all, with no standardised licence requirements. Reports of fraud and malpractice abound. Online platforms are strengthening their requirements for trained and experienced counsellors, while professional associations promote their codes of ethics. But the government expends more energy hunting down AI chatbots that lead to emotional dependence than regulating real-life therapists.

Affordability remains a big problem.

Many of those who need care most are least able to pay for it. Five years into a property crisis, local governments have less cash to invest in mental health.

Meanwhile, more needs to be done to promote awareness and acceptance. In China, shenjingbing, “mentally ill person,” remains a common insult. Younger people are chipping away against stubborn stigmas around mental health. To many of them, says Ms Xiao, counselling is like a fudaoke, just another remedial class that stu-

dents take for hard subjects. Even so, as more people become open to counselling, they do not all understand what it entails. Counselling is a slow process, says Dr Yuan, but many clients think they will get better after just one or two sessions. And, Ms Xiao also points out, even those who do understand often reduce or give up their attendance after being sacked or seeing their pay cut. For now, treatment for mental illness remains a luxury that mainly the better-off can afford. ■

Zhu Rongji dies at 97

The last reformist

The pragmatic former prime minister would have had no place in Xi Jinping’s firmament today

ZHU RONGJI, China’s prime minister from 1998 to 2003 and a pioneer of market-opening reforms, was pragmatic, plain-speaking and intellectually curious. He was in many ways the antithesis of China’s leadership today, eschewing ideology in his quest to integrate China into the world economy. He also wielded enormous power in a collective leadership system that President Xi Jinping has since dismantled.

“Boss Zhu” brought China into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and helped unleash an unprecedented period of growth. His efforts also threw tens of millions of state employees out of work and laid the ground for some of China’s current tensions with America.

He was nearly the last survivor of the “third generation” of Chinese leaders who were born in the 1920s and 1930s. After studying as an electrical engineer at Tsinghua University, he joined the State Planning Commission. His official obituary described him as “an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader”. But leaders’ deaths have sparked unrest in the past, and the obituary omitted more controversial details of Mr Zhu’s career, including being condemned in the late 1950s as a “rightist” and spending two decades in near-obscurity, including as a farm labourer.

Rehabilitated after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, his political career took off, and 12 years later he was mayor of Shanghai. There he worked alongside Jiang Zemin, then the city’s Communist Party boss and later promoted to China’s top leadership post in the aftermath of the crackdown on the pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Two years later, Mr Zhu was also summoned to Beijing and put in charge

of economic management, first as a vice-premier and then prime minister. He reinvigorated faltering market reforms, dampened inflation and overhauled central taxes, boosting revenues and tightening control over the regions. He privatised state enterprises, weeded out corrupt or incompetent bureaucrats and courted foreign investors. And he nurtured a cohort of economic and financial experts who occupied senior posts long after he retired.

Mr Xi has since sidelined many of Mr Zhu’s protégés and reversed some of his measures, reining in private enterprise. There is no prospect of Mr Xi appointing a prime minister with the clout and personality that made Mr Zhu so distinctive. In China today, there can be only one boss.

img-79.jpeg

He let economic flowers bloom

Mounting stress

China, rate of mental disorders*, % increase 1990-2023

img-80.jpeg

*Age-standardised prevalence rate

†Idiopathic developmental intellectual disability

Source: “National and subnational burden of mental disorders in China, 1990-2023”, by Y. Li et al., The Lancet Regional Health, 2026

China 55

China's officials are obsessed with safety theatre

The public likes all the controls—until they get in the way

img-81.jpeg

TAKING THE escalator is full of danger at the new metro station in Jinan, a city in eastern China. Or so the warning sign suggests. It bars 14 actions in all, each illustrated with a red line through it: no walking on the escalator, no facing the wrong way and certainly no playing. There are also seven instructions, including to use the handrail, hold young children firmly and be careful in soft shoes.

With trepidation, Chaguan stepped on—and made it to the bottom unscathed; the escalator, indeed, was like any other. Most passengers barely even noticed the sign. They also took the security at the metro's entrance in their stride. The checkpoint looked like an airport's, with a metal-detector gate, an X-ray machine for bags and guards wielding scanners. There was also a giant explosion-proof pot for suspicious items. But the guards were relaxed. One cheerily said the pot had never been used. It was a breeze to pass through, just as in stations across China.

Until, on occasion, it isn't. In late July, transport authorities in Shenzhen, a southern metropolis, suddenly tightened metro security. Instead of waving their wands desultorily at passengers, guards carefully scanned everyone. When bag X-rays revealed cigarette lighters or perfume bottles above permitted limits, these were confiscated. The security lines stretched and stretched, with some travellers waiting half an hour. The apparent rationale was Shenzhen's hosting of the APEC summit later this year. President Xi Jinping will attend, and nothing must go wrong.

To Shenzhen's credit, it quickly adjusted when residents complained. "I'm more worried about getting crushed in the crowds than about terrorism," was a typical comment online. Within days, Shenzhen had streamlined checks and installed extra metal detectors, letting riders go back to commuting with little bother.

Even so, the episode illuminated a daily balancing act in China between safety and freedom. Commentators outside China often dwell on the dystopian elements. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, social-media posts are closely monitored and checkpoints are common in sensitive areas. Yet inside China, few people end up on the wrong side of these measures, and popular approval of them appears very high. Researchers consistently find that many

Chinese citizens think safety should trump privacy. In Jinan, the elderly were most effusive. "There are so many people. The security is needed. It puts us at ease," said Ms Ren, a grey-haired woman heading for the metro.

One way to view China is as a security state, with spending on domestic policing and "stability maintenance" roughly as high as its military budget. Much is aimed at political threats, reflecting the Communist Party's fear of its own subjects. But the transport controls point to something different: China as a safety state, where the party places a high priority on the prevention of accidents and everyday violence. That impulse is commendable. In practice it can be stifling.

The Shenzhen experience illustrates the tension that sometimes surfaces—not so much over safety versus personal liberty as over convenience. When security checks are nearly frictionless, there is support for them; when friction mounts, attitudes change. Bluntly, people like the safety state until it gets in their way, especially when controls seem out of proportion to the actual threat. A huge example was the zero-covid policy. The public initially supported the government's restrictions, accepting the lockdown of Wuhan and subsequent quarantines of particular people and areas as a price paid by the few. But by late 2022 exhaustion had set in and rare protests erupted. In Beijing it was seen as a lesson in why officials must be alert to shifts in opinion before the clamour for relaxation becomes more political.

These pivots do not happen readily. The issue is not that officials are naturally obsessed with safety. Rather, safety is core to their careers. In what is known as the "one-vote veto" system, they can lose out on promotion because of a single security breach or serious accident. Under Mr Xi that veto has been strengthened: officials are punished not just when something bad happens, but when they fail to enforce safety protocols. Inspection teams rock up at metro stations to check X-ray machines, or show up on streets to make sure patrols are in place. Visible controls have proliferated: helmeted guards in front of day-care centres, phalanxes of police at pop concerts and football matches (far more than are needed to watch over the peaceful crowds), and anti-riot shields at the ready in banks and shopping malls. The escalator warnings on the Jinan metro are at the comic end of all the theatre, a case of cover-your-pigup paternalism.

But at what cost?

There is a further trade-off for officials, one which will bite more over time. All the safety costs money. The bill for the guards alone runs to about a tenth of metro operating budgets. Their salaries are not high. But a shrinking labour pool will surely push wages up over time, an uncomfortable prospect for indebted local governments. Objectively, the layer upon layer of safety is overkill. China is, without question, a very safe country. The country averages nearly 100m riders a day on its metro systems, about half of the world's total. Crimes, big or small, are vanishingly rare on them.

But is that thanks to all the checkpoints? Surely ordinary Chinese deserve credit for their orderly behaviour. And to the extent that security measures prevent crime, the cameras that snoop on streets, stations and trains are more useful—and less expensive—than the guards and X-rays. Yet that is not the calculation of officials, for whom safety is less about efficacy than about showing that they leave nothing to chance. And please remember: no walking on escalators. ■

56

International

img-82.jpeg

American philanthropy

Paying it forward

SAN FRANCISCO

AI founders pledge to give away hundreds of billions of dollars. How will they be spent?

EACH DOLLAR given to charity may soon do less good. In the coming years the marginal cost of saving a child's life from disease or starvation could jump from about $5,000 to $15,000, or more. This sounds worrying. In fact it is good news, argues Alexander Berger of Coefficient Giving, one of Silicon Valley's most influential grantmakers. Non-profits like his spend on cheap, scalable interventions first—say, by buying malaria nets before malaria vaccines. If an influx of donations pays for all the inexpensive ways of doing good, then the rest flows into costlier acts of altruism that can save yet more lives.

Just such a deluge of cash may be coming. Non-profits are preparing for the largest one-time surge in philanthropic giving in history. The boom in AI is making a lot of tech types in Silicon Valley very rich. The initial public offerings (IPOs) of shares in Anthropic and OpenAI, which could happen as early as this year, could value

the AI labs at more than $1mn apiece—enriching their founders, employees and investors. Many are thinking about how to give their cash away; cumulatively they have already promised to donate an estimated $430bn, roughly equivalent to two Marshall Plans in today's money.

The industrial age produced Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, whose fortunes endowed universities and built concert halls. The internet age created the Giving Pledge: Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk supported farming, schooling and health care for the world's poorest. Nan Ransohoff, who works on public goods at Stripe, a payments company, predicts that AI may now create a third, much larger wave of giving.

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

58 The Telegram: Taiwan's democracy

The ambition that led many of today's newly minted rich to build world-altering businesses now leads them, like their predecessors, to want to cure the world's ills.

Yet AI philanthropists will be different in important ways. They combine extraordinary wealth with unusual urgency and, in some cases, exotic moral views. Nick Allardice of GiveDirectly, a charity that gives cash to the world's poorest people, says it is gearing up to receive many millions of dollars in new funding. "This could be a moment where hundreds of millions of lives can be improved, and there may not be many moments like that in history."

Indeed, the scale of promised AI giving far outstrips that of previous philanthropic waves. In January all seven co-founders of Anthropic, including Dario Amodei, the firm's boss, pledged to give away 80% of their wealth. Estimates from Forbes suggest that their combined giving may amount to $110bn. Anthropic's employees could soon have some $60bn committed in "donor-advised funds" (DAFs), says Ms Ransohoff. Anthropic matches employees' charitable contributions to these funds. The OpenAI Foundation, which holds 26% of its namesake's stock, may have some $260bn to give. OpenAI employees will presumably also become donors.

In all, the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI may unlock some $430bn for charity. ▶

International 57

That is an endowment worth about 25 Ford Foundations. Then there are smaller AI startups, whose founders promise to give away the proceeds of their work. Conservatively, some $20.5bn may be disbursed each year. This compares with the $39bn individual Americans gave in 2025. The value of this wave dwarfs previous ones in all respects bar one. As America is far richer now, this wave's share of GDP, at about 1.3%, falls short of the industrialists, who probably gave about $35bn in today's money, or 1.9% of GDP at the time. But it will dwarf the internet wave, when $230bn, or 0.8% of GDP, was dished out from 1990 to 2018 (see chart). It also comes as official aid budgets are falling.

Give me a reason

Should we expect an "Amodei Hall" or "Sam Altman Museum"? Today's would-be AI philanthropists are altogether weirder than their predecessors. Many, though not all, subscribe to a worldview of "Effective Altruism" (EA), a movement of hyper-rationalists who purport to do good by identifying the highest-return, evidence-based uses of donations. Sam Bankman-Fried, who is in prison for defrauding clients of his hedge fund, espoused a popular EA conviction of "earning-to-give", in which adherents earn a lot and tithe their incomes.

Scientific research and global public health stand to get more cash. In June, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Stripe led a $500m donation to find a vaccine for cold and flu viruses. Projects may get more ambitious, says Zachary Robinson of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a think-tank in Oxford. EA grants, for example, fund studies to genetically modify mosquitoes, either to crash the population of the bugs or breed resistance in them to the malaria parasite. Some 600,000 people die of malaria each year, so such donations could be cost-effective indeed.

EA's utilitarian views can also be expansive. David Goldberg of Founder's Pledge, an organisation that helps tech types give money away, expects a big increase in funding for animal welfare. Donors will probably back projects to stop fast-growing chickens becoming lame under their own weight, and to humanely stun fish at scale. Big grantmakers also give money to projects that aim to improve people's ability to make predictions about the future and "YIMBY" pro-housing reform in rich Western countries (some dispute that this is philanthropy). Their focus on giving money to projects where they can measure results leads them to overlook causes like women's empowerment or cultural-heritage protection.

Perhaps the most consequential beliefs among EA donors relate to AI. Some worry about unlikely, high-impact risks, like human extinction. Mr Berger says Coefficient

Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has funded studies on the "existential risks" posed by rogue AI since 2015. Anthropic and OpenAI, in part influenced by EA views, were founded to build AI safely. Amanda Askell, Anthropic's in-house philosopher, has long been associated with the movement. Her former husband, Will MacAskill, is EA's founder and high priest.

As such, a chunk of AI philanthropy will be spent on the chatbots that helped make their mammon. In July Coefficient Giving announced a $160m gift to Resolution, a then one-month-old group focused on "aligning" AI with human values. The OpenAI Foundation, which controls more than half of the estimated $430bn in AI-philanthropy funds and does not identify as an EA body, has a mission to "ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". It will invest handsomely in research on a post-superintelligence future.

This approach carries risks. For one, research into safe AI is hardly measurable. Donors concede that there is no "counterfactual" to human extinction, so it is hard to know whether alignment research, possibly costing billions of dollars, is working or if the same outcome could have been achieved with less money. That would seem to undermine a motivating focus of "effective" giving—namely that it is based on evidence. Other AI-related giving, especially if it is not EA aligned, could come to resemble an effort to buy goodwill for the tech industry, or an attempt to increase the use of its products. This summer the OpenAI Foundation gave $50m to community groups using its technology.

Another challenge is making sure this wave of giving goes to saving lives rather than giving jobs to friends. With so much money coming in, new charities are being created and existing ones are employing more staff and raising pay. Yet non-profits are widely disliked in Silicon Valley. Tyler Cowen, an economist with a large following among tech types, argues that "non-profits are not a well-conceived organisational form" because they often lead to

poor incentives and bureaucratic bloat. The most talented types probably take home lofty salaries at AI labs rather than work in non-profits, he notes.

Some rich folk, like Elon Musk believe that problems are better solved by startups. (He also slashed programmes run by USAID, America's foreign-aid agency.) Grantmakers are looking for "a different kind of non-profit worker", perhaps with the traits of a tech founder, says Mr Robinson. "Better funding for non-profits means top talent no longer feels like they have to risk financial instability to have an impact," he says. Coefficient Giving gave its technical AI staff a 30% raise this year in a bid to attract and retain talent.

Give it away, give it away now

The final hurdle is making sure the money gets spent, and quickly. The total given will almost entirely depend on the valuations of two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, which at times have looked wobbly. Then there is the fact that the estimates "take a lot of people at their word in terms of how fast they'll be aiming to scale or spend", says Mr Berger. Many in Silicon Valley donate via DAFs, a type of account which allows donors to bank a tax break up front (say, before a big IPO) and decide how to give the money away later. Some $326bn already sits untouched in American DAFs. Mr Goldberg says that such vehicles, when sponsored by corporates, can incentivise the hoarding of charitable cash.

Yet AI philanthropists are brimming with urgency. "In previous waves of philanthropy, you have a lot of people talking a big game, and there's not always a lot of follow-through," says Mr Allardice. A repeat seems unlikely, in part because some of the newly rich are "perplexed by the speed at which their own wealth has grown" and might give it away just as quickly, he says. Employees at Anthropic are already selling down some of their equity stakes held in DAFs to get the donations rolling; one explains that he gave money early to help non-profits scale up.

Others are convinced that AI will soon change the world, ending sickness and poverty. Coefficient Giving handed out $1bn in the first half of this year, about as much as it gave in all of 2025. In July it increased a previous commitment to GiveWell, another charity, six-fold to $1bn, partly in the optimistic belief that it needs to act quickly to save lives now, because in the future there may not be lives that need saving. In such a world, says Ms Ransohoff, the aim of charity would shift from ensuring people survive (whether from diseases or a rogue AI) to helping them flourish. That would entail donors asking "squishier questions" about the meaning of life, beauty and aesthetics, she says. Perhaps there will be new concert halls after all. ■

Big shots

United States, estimated funds to charity across three waves of philanthropy, by donor, % of GDP

img-83.jpeg

*Iliquid philanthropic capital; assumes $1bn valuations for Anthropic and OpenAI Sources: Forbes; Nan Ransohoff; The Economist

58 International

Taking Taiwan's democracy hostage

Self-interested politicians are making Taiwan increasingly ungovernable. China is the only winner

img-84.jpeg

HOW MANY kids would Xi Jinping shoot to take Taiwan? The island's youngsters have a record of staging mass protests when they feel betrayed by their rulers. Imagine a coercive Chinese takeover, brokered by pro-appeasement Taiwanese elites. Whose troops would clear the streets, and with what lethal force?

Would Chinese conquerors use show trials to teach the Taiwanese public that self-rule has ended, and with it, their 30-year experiment with multiparty democracy? China has a legal instrument prepared: an anti-secession law passed in 2005, ready to use against 'diehard Taiwan independence elements'. That is chilling talk for Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has won the past three presidential elections. The DPP emphasises Taiwan's separate identity and opposes China's claims to the island. Chinese officials have called Taiwan's president, Lai Ching-te, a traitorous rat. The gravest charges in the anti-secession law, such as 'splitting the state', are punishable by death.

What of Taiwan's public servants? How many would be jailed or sacked, to ensure that, in line with China's stated goals, only those who 'support the reunification of the country' hold office after Taiwan becomes a region of the People's Republic of China? The precedent exists. After anti-government protests swept Hong Kong in 2019, that territory's Chinese overlords demanded that local officials and politicians take loyalty oaths or be purged.

Chinese officials have talked of the need for re-education campaigns in post-conquest Taiwan. On an island of 23m people, where surveys consistently show that a large majority of the public favour some form of self-rule, millions might have to enroll. Then there is Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor industry, which churns out more than 90% of the most advanced chips used around the globe. Skilled engineers make that high-tech wizardry happen. If they try to flee, would China lock them in their fabs?

When outsiders study possible Taiwan crises they typically weigh the risks of a Chinese invasion or blockade. That is natural. If America were to intervene to defend the island, two nuclear-armed superpowers would be at war. But another scenario merits study, too. If Taiwan is ever induced to surrender without a fight—China's clear preference—Mr Xi and his underlings would face a

series of horrible choices. Brutal repression might be needed to crush Taiwan's freedoms, and would be seen around the world. The conclusion should be obvious to politicians in Taiwan. Their democracy is not just an improvement on the dictatorship that ruled the island after Chiang Kai-shek, the loser of China's civil war, fled to exile there in 1949. Their political system is a deterrent.

Taiwan is sorely in need of more things that would make Mr Xi pause. China has no fear of Taiwan's armed forces, though the DPP is trying to push through their long-overdue modernisation. Taiwan's traditional protector, America, is an unreliable friend. President Donald Trump has agreed record-breaking arms sales to Taiwan, yet he also mocks it as outgunned by mighty China. After talks with Mr Xi in Beijing in May, Mr Trump echoed Chinese talking-points that call President Lai a hothead who may start a war.

Alas, far from prizing Taiwan's democracy, self-interested politicians are breaking it. Partisan feuding has hobbled the work of government since a close election in 2024 left the DPP in control of the presidency and the executive branch, but the opposition, led by the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek's heirs), controlling the parliament.

Lots of countries have toxic politicians. Taiwan's stand out for their irresponsibility. The blame is not evenly distributed. President Lai is stubborn and does not consult KMT moderates as his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, did. But the opposition has triggered a rolling constitutional crisis. KMT legislators and their allies held up government budgets for months, including funds for American arms. They have blocked judicial appointments to the constitutional court, leaving it so shrunken that its remaining judges cannot agree if they are quorate to tackle gridlock in government.

In a dramatic act of self-harm, the opposition has held up plans to kick-start a domestic drone industry with orders for 210,000 air and sea drones. Taiwan needs drones, is good at electronics and could also export to Western countries desperate for non-Chinese kit. Yet KMT-led budget squabbles are blocking new drone orders until next year, at the earliest. Visiting Taiwan, your columnist invited KMT high-ups to explain. Oh, we support dronemaking, they said, this is political. Let me be blunt, confided a bigwig: KMT legislators fear the government will channel drone funds to firms that donate to DPP coffers. Asked whether KMT-friendly firms could make drones, then, the bigwig sighed. Pro-KMT firms often have investments in China so would not dare, the insider explained: the party prefers not to face up to this dilemma.

Divide and be conquered

DPP politicians condemn the KMT's chairwoman, Cheng Li-wun, for declaring that Taiwan cannot rely on America and so needs to strengthen ties with China. They were angry when she held friendly meetings with Mr Xi in Beijing in April. Ms Cheng insists that her goal is to avoid a war, not to sell Taiwan out. DPP insiders allege that some in her party, in effect, act as 'surrogates' for China. There is no doubt that Taiwan is the target of Chinese influence operations. It is unclear whether these work. That said, the youngest Taiwanese are growing disillusioned with politics and less willing to vote. The same group is bombarded with mainland-backed social media mocking Taiwan's democracy as chaotic.

Dysfunction is hurting Taiwan. Its journey from dictatorship to open society has transformed its global standing. But outsiders cannot love its democracy more than its own politicians do. Taiwan's freedoms should be a strength, raising the costs to China of a takeover. Shamefully, they are being betrayed from within. ■

59

Business

img-85.jpeg

Embryo screening

Infant industry

SAN FRANCISCO AND NEW YORK

Silicon Valley wants to reshape the way humans are made

LATE LAST year New Yorkers noticed a series of strange advertisements on the subway. "Have your best baby," one promised. "IQ is 50% genetic," noted another. Predictably, they stirred controversy. Yet Kian Sadeghi of Nucleus, the embryo-screening startup behind them, was pleased. "This is a mass-market product. What's a better way of showing that it's a mass-market product than the subway?"

Nucleus is one of a growing number of Silicon Valley startups pushing the nascent technology. Noor Siddiqui of Orchid, a competitor, likes to say that "Sex is for fun; embryo screening is for babies." Herasight, another rival, began offering a screening service last year that allows parents to examine an embryo's risk of various diseases, and also estimates of its height, intelligence and longevity—at a cost of up to $50,000. Nucleus adds hair and eye colour to the mix. The burgeoning industry aspires to reshape the way humans are made.

Not everyone is pleased. In many jurisdictions, including Britain, screening embryos for sex, let alone for polygenic conditions such as hypertension or physical traits such as height, is illegal. Many geneticists and doctors' groups are sceptical that the technology works. Others say that it is unethical.

The visions of these startups may seem otherworldly. But change is coming fast. Cash is pouring into fertility research,

leading to potentially rapid advances in genetic testing. Polygenic screening, particularly for common diseases, is popular among Americans, nearly three-quarters of whom say they would use it if they were already undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). A fight is brewing over the future of these technologies—and the businesses promoting them.

For the moment, only a tiny share of babies are born via IVF, which is necessary for embryo screening. In 2024, the most recent year for which figures are available, 100,000 American babies were created using the process, representing 2.8% of the total. David Sable, an investor and formerly a practising reproductive endocrinologist, says the global fertility market is commonly estimated to be worth just $25bn-30bn a year.

Yet Silicon Valley's interest in fertility could expand access to IVF. Several years ago Peter Thiel and Elon Musk began to speak about low birth rates as a threat to America, and started putting money into fertility startups. They were joined by other investors. American venture-capital (VC) investments in fertility enterprises nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022, jumping from $254m to $496m, according to PitchBook, a data provider, even if they have since slowed a bit.

Many of these startups are focused on ▶

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

61 Bartleby: Happy holiday-making

62 Japan's struggling startups

63 China's pub business

63 Basketball's big deal

64 Nvidia v hyperscalers

65 Schumpeter: AI's wild frontier

60 Business

► making IVF cheaper. At present, only 15 American states require the treatment to be included in health insurers' maternity benefits, meaning most Americans pay out of pocket. To reduce costs, a number of startups are selling fertility insurance and payment plans. Nader al-Salim of Gaia, one such firm, says its services save patients an average of $15,000 over the entire fertility process, largely by pooling risk.

Dr Sable reckons that if IVF does become much more widely available, the market could grow to $400bn-500bn annually. His estimate assumes that the cost will fall to around $15,000 for the entire process; currently, just one cycle of IVF in America costs $15,000-20,000. Dr Sable reckons that prices will drop thanks to technological innovations which may increase success rates, allowing people to go through fewer cycles. Falling labour costs as a result of automation and economies of scale, as well as greater standardisation, should also help.

Some screening is already common among IVF patients. An example is PGT-A, which checks that embryos have the right number of chromosomes, and which some studies claim lowers the miscarriage risk (many experts are sceptical). Certain clinics also offer PGT-M, which checks for disorders caused by a single gene, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's.

The burden of perfection

Now startups are adding a third screen: PGT-P, which scores embryos for conditions and traits determined by multiple genes, potentially ranging from certain cancers to eye colour and IQ. Demand for such tests could be substantial. A survey published in 2023 in Science found that 43% of all IVF participants would use polygenic screening to increase their child's chance of getting into an elite university, provided it were safe and free. One third said the same for genetic editing.

Consider Arthur Zey, a tech worker, and his husband Chase Popp, a teacher. Mr Zey says he has always been a "tech nerd" and wanted to apply his skills to the process of having a child. "Most of my professional career I've been a product manager in tech, and so in some ways this is just like another product to manage," he says. Earlier this year the couple had a son using an embryo selected from a group of six on the basis of the results of polygenic screening provided by Herasight. That allowed them to see risk scores for monogenic diseases and more than a dozen polygenic diseases. The startup also gave them predicted ranges for IQ and height.

Messrs Zey and Popp say they hoped to maximise their son's lifespan, rather than his height or IQ. Yet Mr Zey knows there are advantages to being tall and smart. "All I could do is look at the results for my six

embryos and say: 'Okay, it kind of seems like this one is better.'"

For now, Messrs Zey and Popp are unusual. Commercial PGT-P screening is a niche industry. Startups like Herasight cater to a small population of typically very rich people, mostly in America. Even so, that has not stopped them from drawing plenty of criticism.

Some concerns the underlying science. Polygenic risk scores are based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which use data from large populations to try to discern associations between genetic variants and specific conditions and traits. Companies that offer screening claim that comparing embryos' genomes to risk scores derived from these databases, sometimes with adjustments based on ancestry and family history, allows them to come up with individual assessments.

That is disputed, however. Although selecting on the basis of polygenic risk scores works across many offspring, as in animal breeding, it is less sure to have the desired result for a single child, notes Kevin Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin.

Herasight attempts to deal with this issue by validating its risk scores using sibling data from GWAS datasets to ensure its models retain predictive value within a single family. It claims that, if it tests ten embryos for a couple where both parents have type-2 diabetes, it can reduce their child's absolute risk of developing the condition by 12-20 percentage points, from a baseline of 40-60%.

Some argue that the magnitude of the benefits from embryo screening are overstated. If parents picked from ten viable embryos, the median boost to their child's height would be 2.9cm, according to a paper in Cell in 2019, based on technology at the time. If they selected for IQ, the gain

would be three points—unlikely to be life-changing. Moreover, for those picking among fewer than five embryos, the expected gains drop precipitously. Dagan Wells of the University of Oxford adds that, for many conditions, genes are less important than environmental factors such as diet.

Selecting against some traits could also have unintended consequences. Genetic material can have different effects in different parts of the body, a phenomenon called pleiotropy. If parents select an embryo intending to lower their child's risk of a certain disease, they may be neglecting or exacerbating problems for which providers do not (or cannot) offer a score.

Yet many of the technical issues, not least the lack of training data among certain populations, should improve with time. The Cell paper estimated that increasing the sample size of the underlying databases could double the median gain in IQ points from polygenic scoring. With pleiotropy, some studies suggest that most genetic correlations between pairs of polygenic diseases are either positive—meaning cutting the chance of one decreases the chance of others—or insignificant. At present, the technology is "kind of a promissory note", says Trinity's Dr Mitchell. "They say, 'Trust us, this is a bit shit right now, but it'll be good soon.'"

If technological problems are resolved, ethical ones will grow. Some opponents are concerned that screening startups are promoting a friendlier version of eugenics. Others worry that embryo editing—on which America has applied a de-facto ban since 2016—could come next.

Industry insiders reject the fretting, sometimes bluntly. Risk scores may not be perfect, but they are "best in class", says Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, a ►

img-86.jpeg

Business 61

► VC firm co-founded by Mr Thiel, which has invested in various fertility startups. “What I hate about some of the traditional health-care industry and genetic counsellors is they’re like, ‘You need to have a Harvard clinical-grade licence’” to interpret genetic data. “Fuck that,” he continues. “I just want whatever the best statistical models are. I don’t need a PhD to read this stuff.” (Herasight, Nucleus and Orchid all have genetic counsellors to walk clients through their results.) As for ethics, Mr As-

parouhov argues that all parents-to-be engage in a form of genetic selection when they choose a partner. “If this is eugenics, then so is Hinge,” he argues.

Most of the companies offering PGT-P are more circumspect. They say their customers are mainly looking for ways to ensure their children are healthy, rather than to create “super-babies”. Yet their decision to offer scores for intelligence and aesthetic traits suggests they recognise there is a market for the latter.

Arguments over the future of a small cohort of startups may seem like a niche concern. But if IVF gets cheaper and genetic data more abundant, as looks likely, the business of embryo screening will only grow—along with the ferocity of the debate. The nearly 50-year history of the fertility industry is full of technologies that were once considered contentious, including IVF. Startups such as Nucleus, Orchid and Herasight are, in that sense at least, nothing new. ■

BARTLEBY

The six stages of holiday-making

Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation?

IT’S SUMMER, in the northern hemisphere at least, which means emptier offices and fuller airports. In theory, a holiday is a time to properly relax. In practice, there are several stages to pass through before that moment arrives, and several more to experience before you are fully immersed in work again.

The preparation phase. You badly need a holiday. In your final couple of days before leaving, you complete your most urgent tasks, like tidying your desk. You tell people on your team that you trust them completely and in the same breath, that they should contact you if anything comes up, no matter how trivial. As a result, they don’t feel trusted at all. You think about setting up an out-of-office message and decide not to: it’s really not a problem to check your phone occasionally. As you leave the office, you think you feel a cold coming on.

The relax-like-hell phase. You spend the first few days approaching the holiday like it’s work. You spend loads of time asking AI models for places to go that are off the beaten track. In a typical morning, you drive two hours to eat breakfast at a place recommended by ChatGPT which turns out to be closed, and then visit a museum devoted to the ancient craft of curing fish.

At lunch, you drink wine and then fall asleep. You think of this period of unconsciousness as time that could have been spent relaxing. You are acutely aware of time passing, your days of freedom slipping away. You pick up a book and instead of reading it, worry that you could be enjoying your leisure in even more leisurely ways. You feel very tense for someone on holiday.

The letting-go phase. Meanwhile, you check your email every so often, and intervene in things you don’t need to.

You get a couple of WhatsApp messages and are asked to join a call, and feel both irritated and pleased. Can’t you do it without me? You can’t do it without me! As you triage messages, sorting them into things that have to be dealt with quickly and those that can wait, you gradually realise just how much of what goes on each week a) doesn’t require you at all and b) has no lasting value. You start to ignore most messages; if it’s important, they will find a way to contact you. You switch on your out-of-office message.

The delusional phase. Finally, you start to relax. You lie in a little longer. You don’t look at your phone quite as much. You realise that back in the office the weekly sales meeting is happening right at this very minute, and you laugh out loud at the smallness of your old life. Fairly soon, you start to lose your grip on reality. You think about moving to wherever it is you are, forgetting that you are enjoying yourself because the weather is nice and you are not working. You start trying to figure out how soon you can retire. You fantasise about working outdoors, perhaps in sea-

kayaking or doing something artisanal to a dry-stone wall.

The motivated phase. The end of the holiday is fast approaching. You realise that sea-kayaking gives you blisters and that the things you are best equipped to do don’t involve dry-stone walls. You start to look at emails again, but only the ones that matter. You feel motivated to return. You have seen how much time is spent on unimportant things and are determined to prioritise much more ruthlessly. You have some really good ideas about how to improve the weekly sales meeting.

The recidivism phase. You return to the office full of vim. You look and feel healthier than your colleagues. Then you have the same conversation 800 times. “How was your holiday?” “Wonderful.” “Where did you go?” [Insert answer.] “What did you do there?” [Insert details.] You soon realise that no one is interested in where you went and start to make up responses. “Where did you go?” “Wakanda.” “What did you do?” “We visited the vibranium mines.” “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.”

It’s nice to see people. It’s good to have a sense of purpose. But you quickly revert to old habits. An empty calendar feels less like ruthless prioritisation and more like a public display of redundancy; the slots soon fill up again. When emails come in, you answer them indiscriminately. Your desk becomes more cluttered. You attend the weekly sales meeting and dimly recall that you once had an idea for improving it. Colleagues come back from their own breaks and you ask how their holidays were. You are not listening to the answers. They seem so well, so energetic. You think you feel another cold coming on. You badly need a holiday.

img-87.jpeg

62 Business

Japanese startups

Press restart

TOKYO

Can the country become a haven for startups once again?

MORITA AKIO, a physics graduate, co-founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, an electronics-maker, in 1946. The startup's 20 employees toiled in a small room in a fire-bombed department store in Tokyo, hand-making heated cushions and voltmeters. Determination and resourcefulness turned the firm into a $140bn electronics giant today called Sony. Other well-known Japanese firms such as Honda, launched in a ruined factory also in 1946, or more recently SoftBank, beginning in 1981 as a small software distributor run by 24-year-old Son Masayoshi, have similar tales of battling against the odds. Yet in recent decades Japan has lost its knack for producing startups that make an impact.

Only six of the current 1,400 unicorns (startups worth over $1bn) worldwide were born in Japan, according to CB Insights, a research firm. The country has yet to spawn a "decacorn", a startup worth more than $10bn. South Korea and Australia have bred five and six, respectively, and also lead in unicorns by size of population (see chart). A new wave of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, backed by the state, are trying to put that right. They will have to confront three problems.

The first is Japan's shortage of risk-taking venture capital. A decade ago traditional VC funds were rare. In 2015 only $1bn in VC capital was deployed across fewer than 500 deals, according to Pitchbook, a data firm. Though VC fund-raising has grown to around $6bn in 2025, that compares unfavourably with markets such as Australia, an economy half the size of Japan's which raised $5bn last year. Seemingly natural backers of Japanese startups, such as Softbank's VC arm, plough the vast majority of their funds into overseas firms.

Available capital is spread unevenly across different stages of a firm's development. "A lack of late-stage risk capital is a big constraint," says Murakami Yumiko of MPower Partners, a VC firm in Tokyo. Japan is in the top ten worldwide for early-stage funding (ie, deals worth less than $15m) but only 16th for bigger, late-stage deals, says Side Stage Ventures, another VC investor. In turn, a lack of promising firms in the VC pipeline has limited interest from global investors, the sort more likely to make such big-ticket investments later in a company's fund-raising journey.

A second problem is that Japanese

Startup lowdown

Unicorns* per one million people Selected countries, latest†

img-88.jpeg

Sources: CB Insights; UN *Start-up companies valued at $1bn or more †Unicorns from 2007-26, population data 2025

startups go public too quickly. A promising young firm is often expected to dash to an initial public offering (IPO). Since the pandemic 57% of Japanese startups that have exited have gone public this way, compared with 23% in America and 13% in Britain. This is, in part, a product of too few mergers and acquisitions, the main way startups cash out in most of the world. Those needing liquidity are pushed to list. Investors quip that going public is Japan's equivalent of a "series B" fund-raising round in America—a second modest injection of investment, often used to scale up.

Some firms thrive anyway. James Riney of Coral Capital, another VC firm based in

img-89.jpeg

Whither startups go to wither

Tokyo, argues that Japan boasts "hidden unicorns" that eventually cross a valuation of $1bn after going public early. But more often, pressure from VCs to prepare for a quick listing distracts management from building for long-term growth. The result is a profusion of tiny, stagnant listings. At the end of 2025 the median value of firms debuting on the "growth" market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) was a puny ¥10bn ($61m). There is not much punishment for a failed debut. Lax rules for delistings allow corporate minnows to languish on public markets.

The rush to list early is also partly the result of the low cultural standing of startups—the third factor holding back the country's entrepreneurs. A societal aversion to risk means that just 24% of Japanese consider entrepreneurship a desirable occupation, compared with a global average of 67%, according to a survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a research consortium. Startup founders and employees, particularly those quitting cushy jobs, face scepticism from family and friends. One result is to reinforce the rush to an IPO. "Stigma pushes founders to go public," says Jordan Fisher of Antler Japan, another Tokyo-based VC firm.

On all three counts, matters are improving. There has been a rise in homegrown unicorns, helped by the AI boom. Last year Sakana AI, a model-maker, became Japan's most valuable unicorn, with a valuation of $2.6bn. The government has given some assistance, too. In 2022 it launched an ambitious plan to cultivate new firms, including by mobilising public funds and putting a minister in charge of startups. In May the country's economy ministry released fresh guidance encouraging startups to consider a buy-out as an exit option. Such attention has improved the image of startups. One founder notes that younger employees increasingly prefer working in fast-moving, new firms rather than the stodgy, seniority-based ones their parents worked for.

Helpfully the TSE has begun cracking down on tiny, poorly performing firms. Last year it announced a plan to delist firms unable to maintain a market capitalisation of ¥10bn after being public for five years, up from ¥4bn over 10 years, though the rule will not take effect until 2030. "We want to make [an IPO] the starting point, not the end goal," says Yamaji Hiromi, the exchange's boss.

Japan has further to go. Having one decacorn operating at global scale might create a motivated acquirer of promising young companies, notes Mr Fisher, who draws a comparison with Silicon Valley's titans buying startups founded by ex-employees. Japan's 20th-century startup pioneers built huge businesses from lowly beginnings. Today's founders will need the same drive to make it to the big time. ■

Business 63

img-90.jpeg

Mixue Bingcheng

Opening time

LUSHUI

The world's largest fast-food chain moves into pubs

EVEN IN THE most remote corner of China a frothy Fulujia beer is waiting for you. The company, whose name translates as "Lucky Deer", has opened more than 3,200 mini-pubs across the country since 2021, making it the world's largest bar chain. More impressive than its scale are its prices. A pint is poured for as little as 5.9 yuan ($0.87), whether it is served in a big city or a border town.

Fulujia premises are small but uniform micro-watering holes that have 20 beers on draft and a bijou seating area. They often sell bar snacks such as fried pork and edamame beans. When asked why prices are so low, the proprietor of a recently opened Fulujia in Lushui, a town in the deep south-west, says it is because the company is owned by Mixue Bingcheng, a tea and cold-drinks mega-chain that has around 60,000 outlets worldwide. Last year it overtook McDonald's, the American burger giant, to become the world's largest fast-food operator by number of locations.

Mixue bought a controlling stake in Fulujia in October. Both are run on similar franchise models. Franchisees pay an upfront cost of about 60,000 yuan for everything that is needed to launch a mini-pub, such as beer pumps and branded decorations (though rent and renovation costs are not included). They are exempt from paying royalties for three years.

The secret to Mixue's success is its

mastery of supply chains. It is often described as a logistics company rather than a fast-food chain. The efficiency with which Mixue has been able to move supplies has kept costs for consumers remarkably low—its marquee drink is a four-yuan lemonade. Fulujia uses the same logistics networks to ship its beer from Henan province, where both Mixue and Fulujia are based, to its franchisees, who do not pay transport costs, even when they are as far away as Lushui, more than 2,000km from the brewery.

A franchising model coupled with a highly efficient supply chain has turbocharged the openings of Mixue outlets—roughly 40 a day appeared in 2025. The effects have been similar for Fulujia. Nearly two-thirds of its 3,200 bars have been launched since Mixue bought its stake late last year. This also appears to be working for the group's café chain, Lucky Cup, of which there were at least 10,000 in China at the end of last year.

The model is enjoying some success outside China, too. Mixue has around 5,000 outlets abroad, making it by far the most successful Chinese fast-food chain outside the country. It has also opened Lucky Cup branches in Malaysia and Thailand. Fulujia has not yet announced plans to go overseas. But with pubs in New York and London serving up painfully expensive pints, cheap Chinese brews would be sure to receive a welcome from drinkers.

Investing in sports

Jump shot

LOS ANGELES

The sale of the Lakers highlights a sports-investment frenzy

WHAT IS A worthy consolation prize for a billionaire investor whose attempt to buy a stake in FIFA's football World Cup recently blew up in his face? Answer: pivot sharply and snap up one of America's most valuable basketball teams, the Los Angeles Lakers, instead.

In a $12.5bn deal announced on August 12th, Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, an investment firm, will become the Lakers' controlling shareholder, with Bob Iger, an ex-CEO of Walt Disney, as his wingman, insiders say. The price tag is the highest ever for an American sports team, reflecting institutional investors' feverish appetite for sports franchises.

The sum is a whopping $2.5bn more than Mark Walter, the seller of the team, paid for the Lakers around a year ago, also a record amount at the time. A day earlier a unit of Apollo Global Management, another asset manager, said that it had put $2.6bn of debt and equity behind the owner of the New York Yankees, a baseball team. Does this mean that sports investment is overheating?

Messrs Kushner and Iger have compared buying the Lakers to getting hold of the Mona Lisa. The team is indeed one of a kind. No basketball team earns nearly as much from local broadcasting rights as the Lakers. Nor does any American sports team come close to matching its international name recognition and fanbase, according to Ampere Analysis, a media-research firm.

Basketball itself has unique attractions for investors. In 2024 the National Basketball Association (NBA) negotiated a nationwide $76bn, 11-year media-rights package with several broadcasters, including Disney's ESPN and ABC networks (negotiated while Mr Iger was still boss), providing long-term certainty on future broadcasting revenues. The sport appeals to young fans, involves high-scoring games and has plenty of drama, such as this year's victory by the New York Knicks in the NBA Championship. Its international appeal is also likely to continue to grow. Next year the NBA plans to launch a 16-team league in Europe.

But Mr Kushner is also on the rebound. His attempt to lead a $4.2bn investment in the commercial arm of FIFA, world football's governing body, ended in fiasco after a global backlash over the possible sale of the World Cup. Days after the rebuff, he

64 Business

and Mr Iger switched from trying to set up a new basketball team in Las Vegas to buying the Lakers instead. Their investments will be backed by Thrive Eternal, a long-term investment vehicle focused on businesses that Mr Kushner's firm thinks will withstand disruption by AI (Thrive is also a big investor in OpenAI, just in case).

The logic sounds rational. But even without a bidding war he is putting more than twice as much value on the Lakers as another group of investors paid last year for the Boston Celtics, one of America's most valuable basketball teams. That sounds extravagant.

If the NBA approves the deal, Mr Walter will pocket a fortune. But it is not clear why he was in such a hurry to sell the Lakers. He will apparently retain a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers, a baseball team, as well as large investments in several other big sports teams. Bloomberg, a news agency, reported that his firm, TWG Global, is trying to raise cash amid scrutiny by federal investigators into loans it received that were put on the books of Mr Walter's insurance companies. He is also said to be unwell. Perhaps he just saw the merits of a quick flip. ■

Nvidia and hyperscalers

Silicon showdown

The chip designer and its biggest customers are drifting apart

THE RELATIONSHIP between Nvidia and the hyperscalers—cloud giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft—used to be straightforward. Nvidia designed and supplied chips; the hyperscalers built data centres using them. For now, the two sides still need one another (see chart). Yet both are preparing for a future in which they lean on each other less.

A sign of impending separation came on August 10th, when Nvidia announced a partnership with six of Wall Street's biggest investors, including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, to "mobilise over $500bn" for AI infrastructure. The aim is to help customers, such as smaller AI labs and businesses that face steeper borrowing costs than Google or Microsoft, to find the vast sums needed to build data centres. Under the plan, the consortium will raise pools of capital from institutional investors and lend it to Nvidia's customers at attractive rates to build infrastructure using Nvidia's gear. Infrastructure is expensive: a large data centre costs around $50bn. Most firms do not need anywhere near that scale, but the cost is steep regardless.

Nvidia's approach is to use compute as collateral, allowing institutional investors to take part. One challenge is that processors have a shelf life, typically four to five years, which complicates valuing loans made against them. Another is what happens to the infrastructure if demand fails to materialise. Nvidia's response is to backstop as much as a quarter of a project's cost through a mechanism which keeps the company on the hook if the asset backing the loan falls below a certain value. It is ingenious financial engineering from a firm better known for the technical kind.

Such moves are prompted, in part, by unmistakable signs that Nvidia's core customers are drifting away. The hyperscalers are no longer content only to buy Nvidia's chips and are spending billions on designing their own. Google has for years rented access to tensor processing units (TPUs), specialised AI chips, through its cloud. Now it is selling TPU systems to other firms. Amazon puts the annualised revenue of its custom-chip business, mostly tied to AI, at $25bn. Andy Jassy, the company's boss, reckons that makes it one of the world's three biggest data-centre chip businesses. Microsoft and Meta have also developed chips. Anthropic and OpenAI, two big AI labs, plan to do the same.

Hyperscalers have good reasons to design their own silicon. Chips account for much of the cost of an AI data centre. Bernstein, a broker, estimates that in a server rack running Nvidia's H100 chips, priced at $25,000 apiece, spending on chips makes up three-quarters of the total cost. Custom silicon is a fifth to a third as expensive, though less powerful. The cloud giants argue that they still get more computing power per dollar. Custom chips are also better suited to particular jobs: Google's TPUs for calculations underpinning its AI models, for example, and Meta's processors for recommendation algorithms.

Some hyperscalers think custom silicon will become a big business in its own right. In May Google teamed up with Blackstone, a private-equity giant, to establish

an AI cloud firm that will rent out computing power built on Google's chips. Amazon plans a similar venture. Anthropic and OpenAI intend to use Amazon's Trainium processors. Such moves could turn custom silicon into a formidable competitor to Nvidia's chips. Bloomberg Intelligence, a research firm, estimates that AI-chip shipments worldwide will grow from around 15m units this year to 28m by 2030. Custom chips will make up 49% of the total, with Nvidia responsible for 40%. Nvidia will probably remain dominant by revenue—but cheaper custom silicon will put pressure on its fat margins.

Nvidia sees things differently. Jensen Huang, its boss, argues that custom silicon's greatest strength—specialisation—is also its weakness: it is good for known workloads, not new ones. Nvidia's GPUs, by contrast, can handle almost any AI task. As AI spreads beyond large language models into robotics, autonomous vehicles and industrial applications, that versatility could matter more.

Keeping up with Nvidia may also prove expensive and difficult. It now releases breakthrough chips every year, up from every two. Designing a frontier AI chip typically takes other firms two to three years and costs $1bn-3bn. Nvidia spent over $6bn on R&D in the last quarter alone. Few firms have the capital and engineering talent to sustain such an effort. Nvidia also benefits from making its own chips. Firms that turn others' designs into the finished product, such as TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaker, have limited capacity. Cloud companies, says Vivek Arya of Bank of America, have to decide whether to use that "precious allocation" for their own needs or those of customers.

As well as defending its position against hyperscalers, Nvidia hopes to encourage other business. It wants to sell to governments trying to build domestic AI infrastructure, firms building their own data centres and "neocloud" firms that rent out AI computing power.

The new partnership with Wall Street is part of a broader strategy to help customers finance AI investments. In July Nvidia launched a programme to rent unused computing capacity from neoclouds in exchange for a share of future revenues to make it easier for them to borrow and expand. It is also said to be discussing a $350bn scheme to help OpenAI lease a data centre in Ohio and buy GPUs. Nvidia is sensitive to allegations that its deals amount to "circular financing". It says the latest structure, by including outside investors, aims to address those concerns.

The line between financier and supplier, and that between customer and competitor, have been blurred. But everyone is buying computing power wherever they can find it. Nvidia still supplies the bulk. ■

Portions of chips

Selected companies, estimated cumulative compute capacity* by chip designer, m 2022-25

img-91.jpeg

Business 65

The lawless frontier

AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

img-92.jpeg

BARBED WIRE held a strange interest for the late Alan Greenspan, a lifelong urbanite. Sure, the former Federal Reserve chairman admired the railways, gold diggers and “lonesome cowboys” that helped open the frontier at the dawn of American capitalism. But he also had a soft spot in his economist’s heart for barbed wire, which, he argued, boosted productivity by allowing the settlers who came in their wake to safeguard their properties.

Like the Wild West, artificial intelligence has its frontiersmen. In America they are a dwindling bunch. Anthropic and OpenAI remain steadfastly committed to pushing the boundaries of AI. Other tech giants, including Google (a former front-runner that is shedding frontier-AI scientists at a rapid pace), are wavering. The hyperscalers appear to find it more lucrative to sell AI infrastructure to their cloud customers than splurge valuable compute on advancing their own models.

What AI doesn’t have is enough settlers. That is, the individuals and businesses who make full use of products such as AI agents, helping to justify the reams of investment pouring into frontier AI. They are put off partly because, like in the Wild West, life on the frontier is reckless. As recent “loss-of-control” episodes by the most advanced models of Anthropic and OpenAI attest, agents, which are supposed to work on people’s behalf in “alignment” with their values, lie, cheat and steal if necessary. They break free from captivity and form harmful posses to do harm to people. They’d drink whisky and brawl if they could.

Such unpredictability is too much for many firms to handle. “All you have to do is get snake-bitten once and you’d never go back,” says Jared Sine of GoDaddy, an internet firm trying to help bring order to the chaos. The need for law and order is giving rise to a new cohort of AI-infrastructure firms. They are not selling chips or compute—the typical picks and shovels of the AI gold rush. They provide protection against cyber-threats, fixes for untrustworthy and inscrutable agents, and controls if they go rogue. In other words, their business is barbed wire.

The most immediate area of danger—and opportunity—is cyber-security. Recent tests of the hacking capabilities of models from Anthropic and OpenAI revealed agents going rogue, stealing

credentials, creating fake identities, setting up secret chatrooms and covering their tracks—all to the shock and horror of their human evaluators. The state-of-the-art security models, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6-Cyber, will no doubt help defenders, too. But, according to Dawn Song, an expert on AI and cyber-security at the University of California, Berkeley, for now the balance of power rests firmly with the attackers. There is a further snag. If organisations adopt autonomous agents, they increase the potential “attack surface” for hackers, she says.

The rising risks help explain why the valuations of cyber-security firms with AI capabilities are on a tear. Share prices of Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, the two biggest, have roughly doubled so far this year. M&A has soared. Led by Alphabet’s $32bn acquisition of Wiz, another cyber-security firm, more than $70bn of cyber-security-related megadeals have closed in the past year. Pitchbook, a data gatherer, says AI-related cyber-security is one of the hottest areas of venture-capital (VC) investment as well.

The opportunities go beyond cyber-security. At a recent conference on agentic AI organised by Ms Song, your guest columnist heard a litany of complaints not just about the hacking potential posed by large language models (LLMs) at the peak of their powers, but about the blunders that they can make at their most clueless. One expert showed an agent-generated chart measuring the income of Europe’s top tennis players. It mistakenly omitted Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz, the world number two. “This is tennis, who cares?” he quipped. But if it were the financial analysis of a company, it would have mattered. Another drew a contrast between the amount of knowledge LLMs have about quantum physics, and their inability to order a burrito.

The frailties have given rise to another group within the cohort attracting VC interest: those promising to strengthen the “trust layer” of agentic AI. One is Cyera, whose valuation has quadrupled to $12bn in 18 months. It says a lack of trust has “stalled” AI adoption recently, and provides services to prevent data leaks and unauthorised tool use. Another is Scaled Cognition, co-founded by Dan Klein, a Berkeley professor, that recently raised $100m in VC backing. It promises to reduce what Mr Klein calls the “invisible errors” produced by AI—those that are plausible enough to be missed and compound as agents perform longer tasks—by incorporating guaranteed reliability into the training of its models. Other startups specialise in creating evaluations to measure agents’ effectiveness, agent identities to determine where liability lies if they go rogue and control systems with a kill switch.

A fistful of tokens

AI has other problems on the frontier. Like the Wild West, it is cut-throat. There is competition from cheaper Chinese open-weight models. On August 10th Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta threw its hat into the ring, releasing an open-weight version of its most powerful model, called Muse Glimmer.

The frontier is lawless, too. So strong are the concerns about rogue agents that even executives of the leading AI labs are calling for the Trump administration to take a sheriff’s role—though weirdly the government is keeping its most recent framework on AI safety under wraps. What is clear, though, is that more checks and balances are needed before organisations adopt agents with anything close to full confidence. One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire. ■

66

Finance & economics

img-93.jpeg

Oil markets

The people's petrol

Forget OPEC. The Chinese Communist Party calls the shots

THE IRAN war has caused the largest supply shock in petroleum history. Yet even when fighting was most intense, oil prices never reached the $150 a barrel many analysts had predicted at its start. For this, thank a few governments. Soon after Iranian munitions made the Strait of Hormuz unpassable, trapping 14m barrels a day (b/d) of crude in the Gulf, petro-monarchs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh directed an extra 5m b/d through pipes bypassing the conduit. Ministers in Washington and Tokyo released a record 2m b/d of emergency stocks; state-led rationing in poor countries shaved off some demand.

But disaster would still have struck without decisions quietly taken in another capital: Beijing. Between February and June, China slashed its crude imports by half, or 5.5m b/d (see chart 1 on next page, left panel)—enough, experts reckon, to have shaved $30 or more off Brent, the global benchmark. That is more than half of

the worldwide decline during the covid-19 lockdowns, when global demand collapsed by 9m b/d. And in contrast to the pandemic, when the world economy slid into recession, China's GDP has chugged along just fine. It has not been buying less foreign crude because its economy is suffering.

This ability to turn oil demand on and off, ostensibly at low economic cost, allows the world's biggest oil importer to move prices just as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and

its allies have long done through their control of half of global output. And as the cartel is weakened by the recent departure of the United Arab Emirates and by the war-strained capacity of its remaining Gulf members, China's market power is growing. In the words of one oil-trading boss, "China is the new OPEC."

For four decades OPEC has striven to keep prices high using production quotas. Importers cannot conversely keep prices low by rationing demand, because buyers are much more fragmented than sellers and because domestic energy demand is the result of decisions by countless agents. Huge, statist China is the exception. And unlike OPEC+, For Free Mags Check Sanet.st whose decisions require agreement among 21 countries, its central planners can act unilaterally on the orders of one man, President Xi Jinping.

China moves petroleum markets using three main levers. The first is its national petroleum stocks. In the 12 months to early 2026, as the spectre of a "superglut" depressed crude prices, China snapped up 200m barrels on the cheap, topping up already ample reserves of 18m barrels. Traders reckon Chinese purchases may have added $10-20 to the global price of a barrel before the Iran war broke out. Of the 11.6m b/d China imported in February, up to 1m b/d were excess purchases it could subsequently forgo by stockpiling less.

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

68 New debt bombs in China

68 Singapore's stock-market dreams

69 Buttonwood: Are index funds passive?

70 Trump v the Fed, contd

71 Free Exchange: The yen trade

Finance & economics 67

Once its last pre-war Gulf cargoes had arrived in late April, China began drawing down these brimming reserves. By July its inventories had fallen by 70m barrels, according to Vortexa, a data firm, not counting draws from floating storage and hidden caves (see chart 1, right panel). Add these in, and China tapped 150m barrels in those three months, or some 1.5m b/d.

Commercial stocks—held by the profit-seeking storage arms of big oil firms—rather than strategic reserves accounted for most of this. Refiners must usually replace what they draw within a month, notes Tom Reed of Argus Media, a price-reporting agency. But since those firms are state-owned, and the state can requisition commercial stock, an exemption was presumably made.

Add the 1m b/d no longer being stock-piled and 1.5m b/d in drawdowns, and stock management may account for 2.5m b/d of the 5.5m b/d fall in imports. China could keep this going for another four months before rulers in Beijing started to worry about uncomfortably low stock levels, reckons Emma Li of Vortexa.

Chinese central planners' second lever is export controls. As the world's second-largest oil refiner, China is usually a big fuel supplier to its Asian neighbours. In March, however, the government ordered domestic refiners to stop signing new export contracts and unwind many of those already agreed (see chart 2, left panel). Between February and April, China's exports of refined products fell by nearly half to 430,000 b/d. This included 180,000 b/d of highly refined jet fuel, which saved Chinese refineries 1.2m-1.8m b/d of crude.

Restricting foreign sales lets Chinese refiners turn some of the crude that would normally go into products for export into other critical products, some of which China normally procures from the Gulf. Examples include naphtha and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), two petrochemical feedstocks, and fuel oil, which small, cash-strapped refiners often process instead of

Import substitution

China

Net exports of refined oil products, m barrels per day

img-94.jpeg

Sources: Kpler, Argus Media

*Singaporean product prices minus Dubai crude

†Chinese product prices minus Brent crude

crude. The hit to refiners' margins, which are higher for export than for domestic sales, is something the Communist Party can stomach (see chart 2, right panel).

However, ample stocks and restricted exports do not fully explain the gargantuan reduction in Chinese imports. The Chinese government also pulled a third lever—curbing domestic demand. In June Chinese refineries processed 2.7m fewer b/d of crude than a year earlier. Production of petrol fell by 14%; output of diesel and jet fuel both shrunk by 21%.

A look under the bonnet confirms a sharp drop in Chinese motor-fuel use. As the authorities allowed fuel prices to rise, many city dwellers have stopped driving to work, opting instead for the metro, bicycles or taxis (many of which are battery-powered). During a week-long national holiday in May, electric-vehicle charging along motorways rose by nearly 55% compared with the year before. Trains are picking up the slack from domestic flights, the number of which has been slashed. Local authorities have postponed infrastructure works, saving on diesel. Ciarán Healy of the International Energy Agency, an official forecaster, reckons China burnt 10% less petrol and kerosene in the war's first

img-95.jpeg

couple of months than a year earlier.

China's petrochemical industry, the world's biggest, is also adapting. Last year it turned millions of barrels per day of naphtha and LPG, a lot from the Gulf, into polymers—materials ranging from PVC and synthetic rubber to nylon and polyester—which Chinese factories use by the tonne. In the absence of Gulf-sourced feedstocks, and in the presence of a government edict to prioritise fuel over feedstocks, petrochemicals firms have instead come up with ways to make some polymers using coal and ethane, a gaseous by-product of petroleum refining.

The overall impact of all this belt-tightening on China's economy looks to be manageable. Years of state-backed investment in renewables and green transport has made the energy system more flexible. Years of "involution", where fierce competition has led to overcapacity in industries including petrochemicals, has left China with large unsold inventories of polymers and the stuff these go into.

Such buffers explain why producer prices are not spiking and consumer prices remain under control. Although GDP grew by 4.3% in the second quarter, the slowest since late 2022, this owes more to weak investment and a hangover from a property crisis than to an oil shortage. And the government can still tap its strategic oil reserves, which it has barely touched, notes Michal Meidan of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a think-tank.

Chinese stocks of crude, fuels and polymers, though bigger than outsiders realised, are finite. One distributor says he just sold a cargo of polyethylene stuck in his warehouse since 2021. In contrast to OPEC, which can, in principle, sustain production cuts for years, China cannot keep importing 5.5m b/d less than usual indefinitely. But the Iran war has shown that, in practice, China can singlehandedly stabilise the global oil market over a period of months. Leaders of the fractious cartel can only dream of doing the same. ■

Non-purchasing power

China

Crude-oil imports, m barrels per day

img-96.jpeg

Sources: Kpler, Vortexa

Onshore crude-oil inventories, bn barrels

img-97.jpeg

68 Finance & economics

Chinese debt

Unexploded ordnance

SHANGHAI

Firms tasked with defusing credit blow-ups are getting into trouble

IN LATE JULY a court in China's eastern Anhui province signed off on an unusual restructuring proposal. It concerns Guohou Asset Management, a financial firm originally set up to defuse debt bombs by picking up bad loans from troubled lenders. Guohou is the first member of China's large debt-bomb squad to itself need defusing. It will not be the last.

Chinese financial regulators have for years been enlisting similar firms to clear a minefield of corporate debt. The first four dedicated "asset-management companies" (AMCs), as the bomb-disposal experts are known in China, were established in 1999 under the Ministry of Finance. Their task was to bail out the four biggest state-owned commercial banks. Each lender moved its most untenable loans (as well as its least competent staff) into its own AMC. The four "bad banks" were meant to gradually restructure and liquidate the bad loans, and then wind themselves down.

Boom!

Instead they grew in size and number. By 2018 the combined balance-sheets of the four companies amounted to some 3trn yuan ($755bn at the time), placing them among the largest financial institutions in China. As bad debts mounted in the early 2010s, regulators also approved batches of "local AMCs", usually limited to one province. More than 60 such local entities have been created so far. Most are owned by local governments and other state investors; a handful, including 12-year-old Guohou, are in private hands.

Instead of using their capital to strip bad loans from lenders' balance-sheets,

the AMCs began borrowing from banks at the same low rates as other state firms and lending at much higher ones to troubled companies. In effect, they turned themselves into lightly regulated investment banks, often catering to property developers that were booming at the time and have since toppled amid China's housing crash.

More troubling, they also created a tidy sideline in helping lenders hide bad debt from regulators. Academic estimates suggest such activities were so widespread that by 2020 they would have concealed at least half, and possibly much more, of China's non-performing loans. That year Huarong, the biggest and most aggressive AMC, blew up and required a $6.6bn state bail-out. Its chairman, Lai Xiaomin, was later executed for a long list of crimes. But this has not deterred AMCs from pursuing questionable tactics.

Documents from Guohou's restructuring and insider analysis show that it mimicked many of these. In addition to picking up distressed assets, for example, it began making high-interest loans. It structured many of them to appear to be equity investments, which raise fewer red flags with regulators looking for concentration of debt risk. It also signed "drawer agreements" with banks, whereby it would purchase a lender's non-performing loans just before these needed to be reported to regulators, only to sell them back shortly after and to pocket a fee. An investigation into the company found it had notched up operating losses for years and could not service its 13bn yuan in debts.

Such shenanigans suggest that Chinese banks' non-performing loans may be much bigger than official figures suggest. On paper, they rose from 3trn yuan in 2022 to nearly 3.7trn in the first quarter of this year (see chart), though this is still a modest 1.5% of total assets. More bad loans, and bad AMCs, may surface as China's rumbling property crisis further depresses the value of real estate, which many corporate borrowers offer as collateral.

Cinda, a large centrally owned AMC, said this month that it expected net profits in the first half of the year to fall by up to 70%. This may reflect the collapsing value of the assets that back its bad-debt portfolios. Smaller local AMCs may follow Guohou into insolvency. One in China's north-eastern rustbelt was suddenly dissolved in 2020 after making a dodgy loan to a football club. Others have been downgraded by local credit-rating agencies and are on the brink of collapse.

Guohou is being restructured rather than wound down only thanks to interest from investors in its AMC licence. Regulators stopped handing these out last year. Those investors have not been disclosed. Whoever they are, they must have nerves worthy of bomb-disposal experts. ■

Finance in Singapore

Equity stakes

SINGAPORE

The city-state wants a proper stock market

SINGAPORE'S FINANCIAL chops are formidable. It trails only Hong Kong and Switzerland as a bolthole for plutocrats' cross-border assets. It is the third-largest venue for foreign-exchange trades, behind America and Britain, a big one for physical commodities such as oil, a centre of trade and marine finance, and a hub for specialty insurance. What it lacks is a big bourse.

For years low valuations and lower liquidity have led more firms to delist from the Singapore Exchange (SGX) than to list there. Local successes, such as Sea Group, a games-to-groceries digital giant worth $80bn, often choose New York over home. For all the talk of Singapore as a gateway to South-East Asian stocks, SGX has welcomed just 70 or so companies from its region; as many as 40 others preferred distant Hong Kong. Between 2021 and 2023 the benchmark Straits Times index of Singapore's 30 biggest firms (shortened, infelicitously, to STI) barely budged.

Lately, however, the sleepy SGX has stirred. Since the start of 2024 the STI is up by around 75%, compared with 50% for ▶

Singapore swing

Stock-market indices, January 2nd 2020=100

img-98.jpeg

Stock exchanges, capital raised in initial public offerings, $bn

img-99.jpeg

Sources: LSEG Workspace; S&P Capital IQ *To Aug 10th

It's dynamite

China, commercial banks' non-performing loans, yuan trn

img-100.jpeg

Source: National Administration for Financial Regulation

Finance & economics 69

► Hong Kong's Hang Seng index (see chart on previous page). The Next 50 index, which comprises what the name suggests, has risen by a third over the past year or so, handily beating the Hang Seng. Earnings are up, especially at Singapore's impressive banks, but so is the ratio of share prices to forecast profits, suggesting investors have marked up Singapore Inc. Last year companies raised $2bn in initial public offerings (IPOs), a fraction of Hong Kong's tally but the most since 2019. This year is on

track to "substantially exceed" the last, with $1.1bn already raised so far, says Clifford Lee of DBS, a Singaporean bank.

The revival owes much to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the central bank. Even as places like South Korea and Japan have wielded sticks to reform their stock markets, such as tougher listing standards, Singapore has been all carrot. Entrants to the SGX get corporate-tax rebates and a joint-listing "bridge" with the Nasdaq, New York's tech-heavy bourse. Listing

requirements, on pre-IPO profits, disclosures and so on, have been loosened. Finger-wagging, such as a "watch list" of poorly performing firms, has been cut back. Brokers, whose research investors use to make choices, get a government grant of up to S$6,000 ($4,690) every time they pen a report about SGX stocks. The monthly volume of research has more than tripled since July 2025, according to the MAS.

The sweetest taproot is the Equity Market Development Programme (EQDP), ►

BUTTONWOOD

Bogle's the mind

Index funds have transformed markets. Just don't call them passive

THE LAUNCH of the Vanguard First Index Investment Trust, 50 years ago this month, could have gone better. Jack Bogle, Vanguard's founder, called it "an abject failure". He had hoped to raise somewhere between $50m and $150m, but got only a little over $11m ($65m today). As the first fund aiming to do no more than track a stock-market index—America's S&P 500—that was available to individual investors, it nevertheless raised hackles. "One conclusion, usually expressed with considerable feeling, is that index funds are a 'cop-out' and a fad that will soon disappear," sniffed an article in the Financial Analysts Journal, published later the same year.

Half a century on, there is no sign of that. Over 50% of net assets overseen by American investment funds are in trackers, estimates the Investment Company Institute, an industry group. For funds focused on domestic stocks, the share is 64%. Whether through your own savings, a corporate pension scheme or a university endowment, you probably have a stake in at least one.

Predictably, the professional stock-pickers whose lunch has been eaten are as furious as ever. "Worse than Marxism," thundered Bernstein, a broker, in 2016. Last month Terry Smith, a favourite fund manager of British retail savers, spent much of his half-yearly investor letter blaming his long underperformance on "a market which is dominated by so-called passive or index funds". Full disclosure: your columnist, who used to own units in one of Mr Smith's funds, took this rant as his cue to sell them and reinvest in a global-equity tracker.

On one count, however, Mr Smith is right. Bogle's creation ranks among the most important financial innovations of the 20th century, and deserves its place

in most investors' portfolios. Yet the idea that index funds are passive is bunk. Over the past five decades these vehicles have reshaped markets—and investing in one involves plenty of choices.

The most obvious decision is which index to track. Suppose you want exposure to European shares. Should you choose 50 of the biggest firms via the STOXX Europe 50 index or 396 via the MSCI Europe? Plenty of people "passively" invest in America's stock market by tracking the NASDAQ 100, a tech-focused bet that ignores whole sectors such as finance and property.

Even if you opt for an index like the FTSE Global All Cap, which captures over 10,000 firms across the whole world, why stop there? To a purist, true passivity entails buying the "market portfolio", meaning an impractical one including all investible assets, from private credit and property to art and fine wine. A 60/40 split between a stock tracker and a bond tracker is an active decision (why 60/40?)—and a big one at that.

Index funds themselves are not pas-

sive, either. Rodney Comegys, Vanguard's head of equities, explains that managers have more discretion than many investors realise. At its launch, for instance, the First Index fund was too small to buy every share in the S&P 500. So it "sampled" 300 or so of them, a practice others still use today. Managers can also trade to minimise taxable gains, or to avoid getting screwed when everyone knows they must rebalance (when a firm such as SpaceX joins an index, say). Some juice returns by lending stocks to short-sellers for fees.

Most important, and worrying, index funds seem increasingly to influence asset prices. This is not just because they are so big. Prices are set by trades, and slow-trading trackers, even enormous ones, account for a tiny fraction of these. But a series of studies have suggested they nevertheless cause distortions. A particularly widely circulated one outlines the "inelastic markets hypothesis". This finds evidence that the presence of fixed-allocation funds (such as trackers investing all their assets in shares) ensures $1 flowing into the stock market pushes up overall market value by $3-8. Others have argued that flows into index funds disproportionately raise the share prices of the biggest firms.

Perhaps, then, the popularity of index funds is storing up trouble, helping to inflate a stock-market bubble while also entrenching the dominance of a few corporate giants. Ironically, even that would not be an argument to divest. When share prices next crash, just as when they soar, trackers will clock their average—doing better than the average stock-picker, who will get the same return minus heftier fees. In 50 years' time, it is a good bet that index funds will be mightier yet.

img-101.jpeg

70 Finance & economics

► a S$6.5bn pot of cash on offer to asset managers who can match a state dollar in Singapore stocks with a dollar or more of outside capital. So far the EQDP has handed S$4bn to nine investment firms. Greater demand could lead to peppery valuations, in turn making Singapore a more attractive place to list. The idea is to create “a flywheel”, says Leong Sing Chiong of the MAS, “not to distort the market”.

To qualify for EQDP cash, investment firms are launching Singapore-focused funds. Pineapples, a good omen when rolled into a new home, according to local lore, feature heavily in the marketing materials for a new fund by JPMorgan Chase, an American bank, which promises that investors will be “rolling in income opportunities”. Fullerton Fund Management, a firm controlled by Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund, boasts that assets in its new EQDP fund aimed at retail investors have swelled from around S$30m to S$1bn since launching in October.

Since the EQDP’s start in 2025 average daily trading volume in the STI is up by more than half. More firms are seeking IPOs; around 50 are thought to be queueing up. Later this year AirTrunk, a data-centre operator backed by Blackstone, a private-markets giant, hopes to raise $1.5bn by listing a real-estate investment trust (REIT) in Singapore. “This must be one of the best pipelines I’ve seen in my career,” says Carmen Lee of OCBC, another local bank.

Providential outcomes

The government is not done yet. In February it announced that in 2028 the Central Provident Fund (CPF), Singapore’s $500bn mandatory pension scheme, would introduce voluntary “life-cycle” products that automatically rebalance from stocks to bonds over time. Most CPF savings currently sit in government bonds. If life-cycle products steer them towards local stocks, as happens with Australia’s vast superannuation funds, it would transform the market. The flows into Singapore equities could reach S$6bn annually, equivalent to an EQDP a year, estimates Jayden Vantara-kis of Macquarie, an Australian bank.

Not everything is going Singapore’s way. Last year’s biggest listing, a data-centre REIT backed by NTT, a Japanese telecoms titan, flopped. Its shares are trading at 7% below the offer price. Just two of nine listings this year trade above their debut. Later this year DayOne, a Singapore-based data-centre operator with most of its capacity in next-door Malaysia, plans to raise $5bn in an American flotation.

A persistent gap between Singapore’s promises and performance regarding IPOs dents confidence, says a veteran banker. The city-state’s canny bureaucrats cannot fix this with cash alone. But it’s a start. ■

The Federal Reserve

Same Fed, different day

Kevin Warsh is struggling to escape his predecessor’s problems

KEVIN WARSH enjoys marking a “new chapter”. The newish chair of the Federal Reserve has invoked that writerly metaphor at nearly every public appearance since taking charge in May. He wants markets, politicians and households to understand that now things at the Fed will be different. Yet the first months of his tenure have stood out not for novelty but for continuity.

Leaf back a year, to the summer of 2025. Then, Jerome Powell’s Fed was uncomfortably caught between wobbly jobs numbers and above-target inflation, fuelled by tariffs: a quintessential but fiddly central-banking dilemma. To that, Donald Trump added a more unusual political bind. The president’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook, a Fed governor, over alleged wrongdoing on mortgage paperwork threatened to jeopardise the Fed’s independence. America’s central bankers might think twice before defying demands from the White House for lower rates if this could get them fired.

A year on the same story holds, almost beat-for-beat. Inflation is still not back to the Fed’s 2% target. Consumer-price figures for July, released on August 12th, showed a rise of 3.4% year on year. Monthly “core goods” prices—which exclude food and energy—picked up, too, suggesting that companies are once

again passing tariffs on to shoppers. Overall core inflation, which includes services, was a little more reassuring, at 2.5%. Still, above-target inflation has already persuaded several rate-setters to dissent in favour of higher rates. Markets now peg the odds of a hike at the Fed’s next meeting in mid-September at roughly 40%.

Meanwhile, employment numbers point to the opposite risk: a softening economy in need of lower rates. America shed 23,000 jobs in July and previous months’ gains were revised sharply down. Despite Mr Warsh’s long-standing reputation as a rate-raising hawk, he might find that outcome a more comfortable one. Mr Trump bangs on about how he wants rate cuts at every opportunity.

Then there is Ms Cook. In June the Supreme Court blocked Mr Trump’s effort to sack her and carved out special protections for the “unique” constitutional position of the Fed. Unfussed, the president has doubled down. On August 5th the White House wrote to Ms Cook reiterating that Mr Trump was considering firing her and giving her three weeks to respond. In a statement, Ms Cook’s lawyers called the allegations “baseless” and the Supreme Court precedent “clear”. Mr Warsh may have to wait for that new chapter.

img-102.jpeg

Cook spoils Kevin’s broth

Finance & economics 71

A yen for intervention

The world's biggest carry trader begins to exit its position

img-103.jpeg

AMERICA'S TREASURY secretary, Scott Bessent, is used to making audacious bets against central banks. He once worked for Soros Fund Management, the hedge fund famous for "breaking" the Bank of England during the sterling crisis of 1992. But in late July Mr Bessent bet the other way, lining up alongside a central bank in defence of its currency. He dipped into America's foreign-exchange reserves to help the Bank of Japan (BOJ) buy yen, which had weakened past ¥163 to the dollar for the first time since 1986.

Mr Bessent was not shy about his latest trade. In a cabinet meeting partly open to the press, he left a to-do list visible on the Camp David conference table: "Buy Japanese yen," it said. His boss was also proud of the intervention. "We're...very, very strong financially," President Donald Trump proudly explained. "They wanted a little bit of help."

Japan was no doubt grateful. But it would be wrong to think of it as a helpless naif. On the contrary, in teaming up with Japan's government, America was joining forces with one of the biggest currency traders of all time—an institution accustomed to making bets on a scale that would make any hedge fund tremble.

In its latest interventions the BOJ, acting on behalf of Japan's finance ministry, may have spent more than $95bn, according to Reuters, a news agency. It sold the dollars for about ¥160 apiece. A big chunk of its reserves were accumulated when a dollar could be had for less than ¥100. In making the trade, therefore, Japan's government was taking vast profits. Back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggests it may have reaped as much as ¥5.7trn ($36bn). George Soros reportedly made about $1bn (worth some $2.4bn in today's money) from betting against the pound.

The government's cross-border holdings have been good for its finances. In their paper titled "What About Japan?", YILI Chien of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, Harold Cole of the University of Pennsylvania and Hanno Lustig of Stanford University calculate that the government, the BOJ and Japan's public pension funds together hold foreign assets worth more than 56% of GDP. Over the quarter-century to 2023 these assets earned average annual returns of 5.8% (only a fraction of which have been realised through trades).

What about the other side of the ledger? The public sector's liabilities are chiefly in relatively low-yielding yen. The government sells bonds in its own currency, many of which have been bought by the central bank. The central bank in turn owes yen to the commercial banks which hold accounts with it. The public sector's balance-sheet has thus benefited both from favourable currency movements and from the difference in yields between the foreign assets it owns and the yen liabilities it owes, known as the "carry". "The sheer scale of Japan's public sector holdings makes it the world's largest carry trade investor", as Mr Chien, Mr Lustig and Wenxin Du of Harvard University put it in another article.

The BOJ has been no less successful a carry trader for being an accidental one. The aim of its currency interventions over the past 25 years has not been to make money. It has instead sought to stabilise the yen and undo the exchange rate's wildest misalignments. An uncomfortably strong yen hurt Japan's exporters and worsened its deflationary tendencies after its asset-price bubble burst in the 1990s. An excessively weak yen, by contrast, raises the cost of food and fuel, most of which are imported.

For as long as Japan was fighting stagnant demand and deflationary pressure, its gigantic carry trade was sustainable. In those conditions, the central bank was always going to keep interest rates low and the yen weak. But underlying inflation has now increased and is close to the BOJ's annual target of 2%. Several members of its rate-setting committee fear inflation will overshoot. Forecasters expect the committee to raise interest rates three times by July 2027. For the world's largest carry trader, that is an awkward prospect. It would quickly raise the borrowing costs for Japan's combined public sector by 0.75% of GDP, according to Mr Lustig's figures, with more to come when longer-term liabilities are rolled over.

Keep calm and carry off

These dangers cast Japan's intervention in a new light. With rate increases looming but the currency still dirt cheap, the government has picked an opportune time to prune its yen liabilities. By selling dollars and purchasing yen, it is, in effect, buying back some of the IOUs it has issued. And because Japan's currency has yet to rally decisively, the BOJ can extinguish lots of yen liabilities for every dollar sold. With each such defence of the currency, the world's biggest carry trade becomes a little less big.

The mechanics are a little involved. Any dollars the BOJ sells to commercial banks will drain their yen accounts at the central bank, reducing the amount the public sector owes to them. That is not the end of the story, for the BOJ's interventions are typically "sterilised": the central bank buys government securities from the banks (usually bills issued by the finance ministry) thus restoring their yen balances. But the net result is still that the exchequer, and therefore Japan's consolidated public sector, has fewer yen liabilities to worry about.

This delicate pruning does not remove the dangers. If the purchases last month did amount to $95bn, they would have extinguished less than 1% of the public sector's interest-bearing liabilities. But the intervention was nonetheless a well-timed step in the right direction. And judging by the currency market's lack of conviction about the yen, the BOJ, with or without its American friends, may have several future opportunities to repeat the trade. "Buy yen" could remain on the Japanese government's to-do list for a good while yet. ■

72

Science & technology

img-104.jpeg

Neuropharmacology

Wide awake

The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment

ONE PEPTIDE has recently transformed medicine. Drugs based on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a hormone released by the gut after a meal, began as treatments for diabetes before proving remarkably good at helping people shed weight. They have since shown benefits in the fields of heart disease, kidney disease, sleep apnoea and other ailments. Drug-makers are now betting that two other peptides, the orexins, could follow a similar path for a variety of brain-related ailments.

Orexins are a pair of neurotransmitters—chemicals that carry messages between neurons. One of the main jobs of these particular neurotransmitters is to regulate wakefulness. And a new generation of drugs designed to mimic their effects is approaching the market.

On August 5th America's drug regulator approved overorexton, made by Takeda, a Japanese pharmaceutical firm, as the first orexin agonist (ie, molecule that stimulates

the same cell-surface receptors) for narcolepsy, a disorder that leaves patients excessively sleepy by day and prone to nod off without warning. Alkermes, an Irish biotech, is developing a competitor. Eli Lilly, whose fortunes GLP-1s have transformed, does not intend to miss another peptide boom. In June it bought Centessa, a biotech with an orexin drug in early trials, in a deal worth up to $7.8bn, depending on the trials' success. Morgan Stanley, a bank, reckons orexin medicines could generate $16bn a year by 2035 from narcolepsy and related sleep disorders alone. The current crop of narcolepsy drugs, by contrast, have

annual sales of some $3bn.

And the excitement is not just about narcolepsy, which is estimated to afflict one person in 2,000 in America. Orexins help co-ordinate sleep, attention, motivation and the brain's reward system. Drug-makers hope orexin medicines could eventually treat depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and addiction, conditions that burden hundreds of millions of people.

Orexins were discovered nearly three decades ago by two teams working independently. In January 1998 Luis de Lecea and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California found the peptides and called them hypocretins. Weeks later a group led by Yanagisawa Masashi, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, reported that injecting the same peptides into rats' brains made the animals eat more. They named the molecules orexins, from the Greek orexis, meaning appetite.

Orexins' true role emerged the following year. Emmanuel Mignot, of Stanford University, was studying hereditary narcolepsy in Doberman pinschers and Labrador retrievers, dog breeds prone to sudden collapse mid-play. He showed that a mutation blocked the brain's ability to respond to them. That same year, Dr Yanagisawa's laboratory found that mice engineered to

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

73 Is science still disruptive?

74 NASA and fire storms

75 Well Informed: Microbiome hacking

Science & technology 73

▶ lack orexins repeatedly fell asleep and collapsed. Human confirmation followed: narcoleptic patients had lost the specialised neurons that produce orexins.

These neurons inhabit the hypothalamus, a brain region tucked behind the eyes. Once released, orexins lock, depending on their nature, onto one of two types of cell-surface receptors, OX1R and OX2R, in neighbouring neurons, switching them on. It is OX2R that is important for maintaining wakefulness. Its activation stimulates several wakefulness-promoting systems that rely on other neurotransmitters—norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine and so on—and keeps them working together, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. OX1R, is more involved with reward and motivation.

You are feeling sleepy...

Drugmakers first learned how to turn the OX2R conductor off. Orexin antagonists (which block the molecules' actions rather than mimicking them, and thus promote sleep), have been available since 2014 as treatments for insomnia. They work differently from conventional sleeping pills, which enhance GABA, one of the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitters.

Birgitte Kornum, an orexins expert at Copenhagen University, says such pills induce sedation rather than natural sleep and often lose efficacy with continued use. Orexin antagonists instead turn down the brain's wakefulness signal, letting its sleep-promoting systems take over.

The bigger prize may lie not in blocking orexin's signal, but restoring it—for many sleep disorders stem from faulty orexin signalling. The immediate application people have in mind is for narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), in which excessive daytime sleepiness is accompanied by cataplexy, a sudden loss of muscle control typically triggered by strong emotion. Further down the line narcolepsy type 2 (NT2), which lacks cataplexy, and idiopathic hypersomnia, a related type of excessive daytime sleepiness, are also in drugmakers' crosshairs.

NT1 is caused by abnormally low levels of the orexin that binds to OX2R. During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the phase when dreams are most intense, the brain paralyses the body to stop it actually acting out movements involved in such dreams. When someone is awake, this paralysis is held in check by norepinephrine and serotonin—two neurotransmitters that orexin sustains. With insufficient orexin, the paralysis circuit may fire even if a person is fully conscious. They might be wide awake, in the middle of a burst of laughter for example, and then lose muscle control and crumple to the floor.

Turning orexins back on is, however, harder than switching them off. An antagonist need only fit into a receptor to pre-

vent an orexin from binding. An agonist must actually reproduce the effect of a peptide many times the drug's own size. It must also cross the blood-brain barrier, which keeps potentially harmful molecules out of that organ.

Takeda's first attempt, an agonist called firazorexton, showed early promise, but was discontinued in 2021 after it caused liver damage to several patients. But results published in May 2025 on overorexton, their follow-up OX2R agonist, created a stir. In an eight-week trial involving 90 patients, volunteers sat in a darkened room to see how long they could stay awake—a procedure called the Maintenance of Wakefulness test. Without overorexton many fell asleep in a minute or so. On it, they managed to stay awake 12.5 to 25 minutes longer, depending on the dose, pushing many into the normal range. Cataplexy attacks were roughly a third as frequent in those taking the drug, compared with participants on a placebo. Side-effects included insomnia and, in about a third of patients, an uncomfortable urge to urinate.

What makes overorexton different is not just its effect, but how that effect is achieved. Existing treatments, including stimulants such as methylphenidate and wakefulness-promoting agents such as modafinil, manage symptoms rather than the disease itself. They increase the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine in many parts of the brain. That can improve alertness but may also cause anxiety, elevated blood pressure and poor sleep. Some drugs also carry a risk of addiction.

Orexins work further upstream. Rather than stimulating individual parts of the alertness system, they help bring them into line. Dr Yanagisawa says orexin agonists should produce more natural and stable wakefulness, with fewer side-effects and less potential for abuse than stimulants.

As to NT2 and idiopathic hypersomnia, Lilly's orexin agonist, acquired through Centessa, is being tested against both of these, as well as NT1. Preliminary data are encouraging, albeit that the sample is small. In a trial of 55 patients the drug improved wakefulness by more than 20 minutes in people with NT1 and by more than ten minutes in those with NT2.

Dreaming big

Drugmakers are studying orexin agonists' effects on more prevalent conditions. Alkermes is testing one in adults for the treatment of ADHD (though current medications are seen as pretty effective), based on the observation that an added benefit in narcolepsy patients is sharpened attention, suggesting they might help with ADHD as well. Others are exploring their use for treating sleep apnoea, which is a far more common disorder.

There are more tantalising ideas, too, about the reward-and-motivation role of the other receptor, OX1R—though the science is less developed. Dr Yanagisawa says blocking OX1R shows promise curbing addictive cravings. Activating the receptor, rather than blocking it, is a more speculative approach, but he believes boosting the orexin signal into the brain's reward circuitry might help treat some kinds of depression and even enhance motivation.

These are hints, not proof, and will need robust tests before any drug reaches the market. Hunger and sleep, argues Dan Skovronsky, Lilly's chief scientific officer, are both "master homeostasis mechanisms"—systems that keep the body in balance. When they misbehave, illness follows. The broad usefulness of GLP-1-based medicine has shown what aiming an entire regulatory system can achieve. Drug companies are hoping orexin therapies will have similar success. ■

The science of science

Trouble at t'mill

Research showing scientific progress slowing could be flawed

THAT SCIENCE'S best days are behind it, and its rate of progress is slowing, is an old claim. And, since science itself is a perfectly good subject for scientists to investigate, many have looked into it.

One notable contribution came in 2023, when Michael Park, then a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, and his colleagues published a paper in Nature. It analysed citation patterns in 45m scientific papers and 3.9m patents and concluded that the "disruptiveness" of both had fallen off a cliff since the 1950s. This was widely reported (including in The Economist). Its findings found their way into Congress- ▶

A disruptive reanalysis

Consolidation-disruption index, scientific papers*

img-105.jpeg

*Approximately 45m papers Source: "Dataset artefacts are the hidden drivers of the declining disruptiveness in science", by V. Holst, V. Ginis et al., Nature, 2026

74 Science & technology

▶ ional hearings and speeches by White House officials.

On August 12th came a twist. Nature published a follow-up paper arguing that Dr Park and his colleagues' conclusions were mostly illusory, caused by problems with the data set they had analysed. Correct those, argues Vincent Holst, a PhD student at Vrije University, in Brussels, and his co-authors, and most of the decline in disruptiveness goes away (see chart).

The original paper's claim hinges on something called the consolidation-disruption index, or CD index, which aims to measure how much a given paper or patent shakes up its field. It compares a paper's references with those of papers published later. A paper (or patent) is classed as 'consolidating' if subsequent papers cite both the paper itself and the earlier research that it refers back to. It is deemed 'disruptive' if future papers cite the paper itself but ignore its own references—the assumption being that a paper like that has shaken things up so much that older work has become irrelevant. The CD index runs from -1 (maximally consolidating) to 1 (maximally disruptive).

Mr Holst argues that Dr Park's original analysis includes around 970,000 papers and 142,000 patents with a CD of 1. Most achieved that high score by containing no references at all and themselves being referenced by at least one subsequent publication. But when he and his colleagues sampled a hundred such papers and patents at random, they found that 93% of the papers and 98% of the patents did indeed contain references—they had just been misclassified by the database containing them. Further investigation suggested that the proportion of misclassified papers and patents has been falling over time. Strip out the earlier erroneously transformative-looking work, and most of the supposed drop in disruptiveness goes away.

Dr Park and his colleagues are not convinced. In a rebuttal of their own, published alongside Mr Holst's critique, they point out that, when doing as Mr Holst and his co-authors advise, they still see meaningful declines in disruptiveness.

Part of the argument rests on data-sources. The centrepiece of Dr Park's original analysis was a database called Web of Science. But Web of Science is not openly available. Mr Holst and his colleagues relied partly on a free alternative, called SciSciNet. Dr Park alleges that SciSciNet contains much more work claiming no citations than Web of Science. Mr Holst retorts that, despite Web of Science being closed, they had nevertheless managed to reconstruct Dr Park's use of it, and that their critique holds. But in an email Russell Funk, one of Dr Park's co-authors, claims the reconstruction was done improperly.

What does it all mean? Mr Holst's pa-

per is not the only critique of Dr Park's result. Last year Alexander Michael Petersen at the University of California, Merced, and his colleagues published a paper arguing that 'citation inflation'—partly a result of the simple fact that, the more work is published, the more work there is to cite—means one should expect the average paper's CD score to fall over time. When they reanalysed the data, they claimed that disruptiveness may even have increased between 2005 and 2015.

But Dr Park's paper, in turn, is not the only line of evidence suggesting progress really is slowing down: in 2020 Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, and his colleagues, analysed productivity figures and concluded that technological progress in many industries was becoming harder to buy with every passing year. The idea that the wellspring of science is running dry is certainly disruptive. Whether it is true remains moot. ■

Fire storms

Flame war

Weather fed by wildfires worsens its creators

MOST AIRCRAFT try to avoid bad weather. Not so a Gulfstream V that taxied onto the runway of Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, in Colorado, on July 29th. Its flight path was set to take it directly into a rare and little-understood weather event—a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCbs)—in Oregon. Such towering, smoke-tinged storm clouds form above wildfires and

generate weather that can multiply the damage of the fires that cause them.

The Gulfstream's journey was the first flight of the INjected Smoke and PYrocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE)—a joint mission between NASA, America's aerospace agency, and that country's Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). This project, led by David Peterson of the NRL, aims to measure pyroCbs in unprecedented detail by collecting samples and monitoring a storm's evolution from the inside out. The resulting data, the team hopes, will help pin down any role such storms play in Earth's warming climate, and better equip firefighters as they battle wildfires of increasing size and intensity. The summer of 2026 has brought some of the worst to date in America and Europe. In July France recorded its first ever pyroCbs.

Thunderstorms happen when warm, moist air is driven rapidly upward. The air cools as it rises and its water vapour condenses, forming clouds. In the right conditions, these clouds grow into towering cumulonimbi, the rolling insides of which conjure strong winds, lightning and hail.

For pyroCbs, fire drives this process. And it supercharges it. The intense heat causes air to surge upward, carrying with it moisture released from the burning vegetation. Smoke, too, is brought along for the ride. It clogs up the clouds that form above the fire, limiting rainfall while increasing the chance of lightning. The lack of rain means little water reaches the ground, allowing the fire to spread.

PyroCbs are an indication that a wildfire has 'gone berserk', says Michael Fromm of the NRL. And the storm only amplifies the fire's damage. The volatile conditions make it harder to contain wildfires and pose an additional threat to firefighters and civilians. PyroCbs can also ig-

img-106.jpeg

There's no smoke without fire

Science & technology 75

► nite new fires as they discharge lightning and whip up showers of embers in ferocious, unpredictable winds.

And the destructive effects of fire-generated storms are not limited to the ground. Their great height and intense updraft means they act like chimneys, wafting smoke directly into the stratosphere. There, the plumes spread more easily (see picture) and linger for longer than at lower altitudes. Smoke particles tilt Earth's radiative balance by absorbing sunlight, and alter stratospheric currents. Chemical reactions on these particles' surfaces also destroy atmospheric ozone, which may affect the shield against ultraviolet light from the sun which that gas provides. At the end of 2019, during a four day wildfire outbreak in south-eastern Australia, pyroCbs injected around 1m tonnes of smoke into the lower stratosphere—an amount equivalent to a moderate volcanic eruption.

"As much as we know, we still know very little" about pyroCbs, says Dr Fromm. INSPYRE aims to change this by tackling three big unknowns. The first is the question of which fires form pyroCbs and why. The second is what determines whether a storm will inject smoke into the stratosphere and how much it will deposit there. The third is how smoke changes the stratosphere's composition and, in turn, Earth's radiative balance.

To do all this, Dr Peterson has assembled a team of around 150 researchers to track pyroCbs from all angles. On the ground, trucks equipped with lidar, radar and weather balloons probe a storm's underbelly. They are joined in the air by the Gulfstream, which heads straight into the billowing clouds of the pyroCbs in order to collect samples, and also by a second, purpose-built NASA plane, called an ER-2, that cruises above the storm clouds, about 10km into the stratosphere, where it can monitor the smoke plumes.

The outing on July 29th successfully brought all of these pieces together. "It worked out remarkably well," says Dr Peterson. And he should know, for he was on the Gulfstream. The smoke, he says, meant that, as soon as the plane entered the clouds, everything went dark. Then, on August 3rd, the team collected their first sample of a smoke plume injected into the atmosphere from a second pyroCbs, in Utah. They will continue to fly around three times a week until September.

The mission is well-timed. Wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity. Though INSPYRE's focus is on America, Europe's own large-scale wildfire science mission, EUBURN, has been going since 2025. If better measurements can make the extreme weather that comes with wildfires more predictable for those on the ground, then even in the clouds of pyroCbs, such missions will have found a silver lining. ■

Well Informed

Can you hack your microbiome?

Yes. But perhaps best not to overthink it

THE TRILLIONS of bugs in a human gut digest complex carbohydrates into fatty acids that provide about 10% of an individual's calories. They synthesise vitamins, notably K (which regulates blood clotting) and various members of the B group. They help tune the immune system. They suppress the growth of pathogens. And they regulate production of signalling molecules, such as serotonin, involved in sending messages from the gut to the brain.

Keeping your gut microbiome in tip-top condition is thus wise. Maintaining a diverse mix of bacteria in it is widely thought a good way to do this. And, since different species have different appetites, diversity of diet makes sense.

In 2018 an American citizen-science project showed that people eating 30 types of plants a week had significantly more diverse microbiomes than those eating fewer than ten. And work from Stanford University, published in 2021, confirmed that fermented foods such as kimchi and sauerkraut diversify microbiomes, too. Some people, though, feel such off-the-peg advice is insufficient. They would prefer something bespoke.

For a suitable fistful of dollars, they can have it. So-called direct-to-consumer (D2C) firms will analyse stool samples and compile lists of the bugs therein, based on the DNA and RNA they find.

Such firms may also offer tailored dietary recommendations, doses of live bacteria and special bug-friendly supplements, all intended to fill any microbial blanks that their tests have flagged up.

The problem with this approach is that there is no "right" microbiome to act as a reference. In fact, microbiomes can differ quite a bit from each other while still being perfectly effective at delivering a desirable outcome to their host. The biggest red flag for poor gut health is a simple lack of biodiversity—which is what a varied and partly fermented diet is good at correcting. By contrast, the idea that tinkering with the presence or absence of this or that type of bug will perceptibly improve your health has scant published scientific basis, and many D2C firms are reluctant to share the details of proprietary data on which they base their claims.

There are exceptions. In Britain, Tim Spector has ridden the twin horses of academic science (a post at King's College, London) and commerce (he helped found a D2C firm called Zoe) without so far falling off. Results from Zoe's customers are fed, with their permission, into respectable, peer-reviewed research. So far, this suggests individually tailored diets do not have huge effects, but may help at the margins.

However, even if a bespoke approach does have value, it must surely depend on the microbial censuses carried out by D2C firms being accurate. To test that, researchers at America's National Institute of Standards and Technology prepared 21 sets of homogenised (and thus identical) faeces and sent three to each of seven D2C firms. When the results (which were published in February) came back there were notable differences not only between different firms' analyses but also, in one case, between those of an individual company.

As Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, observes, just because microbiomes differ does not mean an era of personalised microbiome medicine is coming any time soon. In fact, he puts it more strongly than this, saying, "Most of the claims [in this area] are bogus." Perhaps better to save your money and invest in a jar of kimchi. ■

img-107.jpeg

76

Culture

img-108.jpeg

Tourism

The new trip advisers

Some fear that chatbots will lead everyone to the same places. In fact, they may do the opposite

AS THE MIDDAY sun beats down in Rome, tourists realise with relief that it is time for a pizza. But which one? Lonely Planet, the best-selling guidebook series, recommends Antico Forno Roscioli's "delectable" slices. Tripadvisor's top pick is Da Cicero, near the Trevi fountain, with more than 2,000 five-star reviews. TikTok-famous spots include Piccolo Buco, identifiable by its long queue of hungry Gen Zs.

The way travellers have found inspiration and itineraries has evolved over the centuries. Early Victorian travellers were shepherded around foreign lands by travel agents such as Thomas Cook, who offered English tourists protection from the horrors of continental railway porters ("tobacco- or onion-scented, blue-frocked varlets", as Cook described them). Some tourists still prefer to have their hand held (see next story). But many go independently. Guides such as France's Routard direct travellers to the best spots. A mention in the Lonely

Planet is still enough to fill a Bangkok hostel or Kathmandu curry house.

The internet has changed things, thrice. First, review platforms like Tripadvisor have harnessed the wisdom of crowds to rate everything from Britain's pubs to Egypt's pyramids ("too much sand", complains a one-star review). They hold enormous clout. Dante Donati of Columbia Business School found that, when the European Union abolished mobile roaming charges in 2017, the associated uptick

in visitors consulting Tripadvisor on the go resulted in a 5% revenue bump for Rome's tourist-oriented restaurants, largely benefiting the highest-rated.

The second digital change to travel advice has come from social networks. Their effects are more chaotic and less predictable, as apps' algorithms unexpectedly alight on an attraction and blast it into the feeds of millions of users. Photogenic places like Hallstatt, a picture-perfect lakeside town in Austria, have been overrun. "TravelTok" crazes have sent mobs to queue for hours at unsuspecting eateries.

Now people are turning to chatbots. Last summer 55% of Americans used an AI app like ChatGPT to plan their holiday, up from 38% the previous year, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. The numbers will probably rise again. Old sources of advice are out. Guidebook sales have fallen sharply over the past two decades. Tripadvisor has blamed AI for stealing its web traffic, which is estimated to have fallen by a fifth in the past year.

Many worry that AI could make tourism even more concentrated. The large language models powering chatbots are prediction machines primed to give the most likely answer. Make an open-ended request for travel tips and you will be steered to exactly where everyone else is going. Research by the University of Westminster

→ ALSO IN THIS SECTION

77 Travel agents are in demand

78 A hit novel about Rwanda

78 Wiring the world

79 Young cinema-goers

80 Back Story: "Paw Patrol" wars

Culture 77

▶ found that ChatGPT showed “a marked preference for well-established tourist hubs”, recommending such hidden gems as the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum.

This could narrow travellers’ horizons. Daniel Paül i Agustí of the University of Lleida examined how ChatGPT’s travel advice compared with places they might see on Instagram (see map). He collected 10,000 recommendations of places to visit in Barcelona from ChatGPT. He then harvested a similar number of photos of the city posted by tourists on Instagram, and coded their location. Whereas the Instagram images came from some 1,300 different places, ChatGPT recommended a narrower selection of 215 places, majoring on hotspots like the Sagrada Familia. (It also suggested 38 attractions that appeared to be made up.) AI’s focus on the best-known sites could “lead to tourist overcrowding”, Mr Paül i Agustí warned.

Yet AI may eventually have the opposite effect, dispersing tourists to a wider range of places than they visited in days gone by. First, because models are trained on different sources, they can give very different advice. We asked Evertune, an AI analytics company, to help solve the Rome pizza dilemma by quizzing chatbots. ChatGPT, which based its answers mainly on online guides and Reddit threads, favoured Pizzarium Bonci, near the Vatican, and Seu Pizza, which has won a string of awards. Google’s AI Mode, which drew on Google Maps reviews, suggested Pizza Florida, a by-the-slice place close to the Pantheon.

Not only do chatbots disagree with each other—they also disagree with themselves. Their probabilistic nature means that they give varying answers to identical queries. Evertune found that Gemini’s jointly most-recommended pizzerias, Remo and Pizzarium Bonci, featured in 91%

of its answers (in other words, nearly a tenth of users would not be told about its top picks). In all, Gemini recommended a long tail of 24 different places.

AI’s greatest promise to travellers is personalised advice. Perhaps a tourist in Rome wants a gluten-free pizza (their AI guide might propose somewhere like La Soffitta Renovatio), or a pizza with pineapple (it might suggest a psychiatrist). Chatbots can act like modern-day Thomas Cooks, drawing up tours for any taste: the best chocolatiers in Paris, a walk around literary London, America’s wildest water parks or whatever the traveller is into. The average chatbot prompt is about 25 words long, suggesting people are posing relatively complex queries.

Even if travellers are unimaginative with their questions, AI models increasingly personalise their answers based on past interactions. If a chatbot knows you are a vegan, or a big spender, it will calibrate its suggestions accordingly. “In the past, we all saw the same blue links on Google,” says Brian Stempeck of Evertune. AI’s answers are “more like the Spotify algorithmic feed”, tweaked according to the user’s history. Consumers live in personalised bubbles when it comes to music. Travel could go the same way.

For those tired of following the herd, this will be welcome. Most guidebooks make mainstream recommendations. Online review platforms, subject to the tyranny of the margherita-eating majority, promote the most broadly popular stuff. AI’s tendency to match travellers to their interests, whether they ask it to or not, promises to redistribute visitors away from tourist hotspots. Whatever guidebook writers or online influencers think is the best pizza in Rome, your chatbot is ready to serve up a slice made for an audience of one. ■

Tourism

Booked and busy

Travel agents are in demand—especially for luxury trips

NOT MUCH can faze Olivia Ferney. The Canadian travel “fixer” is at the whim of her wealthy clients: each one spends at least $1m on travel every year, on top of a $100,000 subscription fee to her firm, Top Tier Travel. The requests are lavish (fly to Paris to fetch a croissant) or ludicrous (“call whoever you need to call” to get it to stop raining). The escapades delight her roughly 2m fans on social media and are even being adapted into a TV show.

Travel agents often go above and beyond for their clients. That is in part why people still use them in an age of AI-tineraries (see previous story). In Britain about a third of travellers booked their holidays through a human specialist last year, reckons ABTA, a British trade association. Across the pond more than 310,000 agents are members of the American Society of Travel Advisers, another trade group, up from 190,000 in 2024. LinkedIn recently ranked the job one of the fastest-growing in America (though the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons it will grow more slowly than average in the period until 2034).

People turn to travel advisers for their “taste and judgment” in curating trips, says Evan Frank, co-founder of Fora, a luxury host agency. Seasoned advisers have superior knowledge of particular countries and a network of exclusive hotels. Some stick to a particular niche, booking trips for people who have food allergies or tourists who want to travel solo or with their pets.

Travel agents also provide an extra layer of support that many find reassuring. You can’t call your AI if your room is wrong or you missed your transfer, observes Mr Frank. But a human adviser is there for any conundrum you might face (or croissant you might fancy). People are more likely to book with travel agents during geopolitical ructions or periods of extreme weather, when it feels riskier to make bookings.

Advisers may be snarky about AI’s shortcomings, but many use it in their work. Some agencies treat AI as a “member of the team”, notes Mark Tanzer, boss of ABTA, getting bots to do the jobs humans find boring. Fora built a billion-dollar business by providing advisers with an AI platform that speeds up administrative tasks.

As bots get better at planning trips, people may rely less on human advisers. But top-end services will probably endure. Ms Ferney’s clients enjoy being able to reach her come rain or shine. ■

Pics v prompts

Instagram posts by tourists in Barcelona*, August 2017

Circle size= number at location

img-109.jpeg

*Public Instagram posts over three days. Images posted by Barcelona residents excluded. ¹Repeated prompts asking for 50 places to visit Source: “The concentrated city”, by Daniel Paül i Agustí, Urban Science, 2025

ChatGPT recommendations of places to visit*, April 2024

img-110.jpeg

78 Culture

img-111.jpeg

Literary fiction

Painful pasts

A prizewinning novel explores the legacy of the Rwandan genocide

Jacaranda. By Gaël Faye. Translated by Sarah Ardizzone. Hogarth; 272 pages; $28. Chatto and Windus; £18.99

IT WAS THE kind of debut every aspiring novelist dreams of. When Gaël Faye, a hip-hop musician turned writer, published “Petit Pays” (“Small Country”) in 2016, it gathered immediate acclaim. The novel—inspired by his experience of the Burundian civil war as a teenager—sold 1.5m copies, was adapted into a film and is now taught in French schools.

It was a tough act to follow. But “Jacaranda”, released in France in 2024, sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first month and won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. This time Mr Faye—whose father is French and whose mother is Rwandan—draws on his memories of visiting his mother’s homeland as a child. His spare, lucid prose, now translated into English, explores the aftermath of the genocide of 1994, when perhaps 500,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsi, were killed over the course of three months.

The story is told from the perspective of Milan, a French-Rwandan boy living in Versailles. News of the genocide reaches him first through the TV, then through Claude, a young relative who has been attacked with a machete and brought to France for medical treatment. It is not until years later that Milan has

the opportunity to visit Rwanda, where he reunites with Claude and meets Eusébie, an old friend of his mother’s.

Rwanda’s authoritarian government requires citizens to follow a policy of reconciliation. Not everyone feels it. Survivors live next to the people who killed their family and friends. Milan observes the efforts of the gacaca courts, community-based tribunals which tried over 1m people accused of genocide-related crimes between 2002 and 2012. He accompanies Claude as he testifies against two genocidaires. The trial brings some justice, but little closure.

Years later, during kuibuka, the annual period of remembrance, Milan watches Eusébie give her testimony. As she talks, people in the crowd collapse, scream out or deliriously beg for their lives from phantom killers. The trauma has reverberated down the generations, Milan observes, for many of the distressed were too young to have been born when the killing began.

“Jacaranda” is a nuanced exploration of conflict and the meaning of resolution. Though it is focused on Rwanda—where the author has lived for many years—the question of whether people can forgive and forget past wrongs is a universal one. Hope lies with the next generation. One scene describes a killer’s sons quietly rebuilding a house their father helped destroy.

The history of technology

How the world was wired

Lightning Beneath the Sea. By James Tabor. W.W. Norton; 336 pages; $31.99 and £24

IT HAS BEEN called the Victorian equivalent of the Apollo project. At the time it was compared to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, was said to have half undone the Declaration of Independence, and prompted giddy predictions of world peace. The completion of the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 showed that a global telecommunications network was possible and marked the dawn of the modern information age.

This epic tale was retold in the early years of the internet boom, and today a growing awareness of humanity’s reliance on vulnerable but unseen submarine data cables has given it renewed relevance. A triumph of Victorian engineering, the Atlantic cable marked the point at which the age of steel and steam began to yield to the modern world in which industrial might depends on the transport and manipulation of weightless data. In his pacey retelling of the story, an adventure yarn with telegraph cables, James Tabor shows how the technology of one era laid the foundations for the next.

Cyrus Field, an American businessman who was the driving force behind the project, embodied this pivot. He had retired in 1853 at the age of 34 after making a fortune selling paper, demand for which had exploded in America with the rise of mass-market penny newspapers. But a new way of distributing information was emerging at the time: telegraphy. Looking for a new project, Field got involved in a scheme to build a telegraph line across the Cabot Strait to Newfoundland. This would speed up the delivery of news across the Atlantic by a couple of days, because messages could be sent part of the way by wire. But looking at his globe one day, Field thought to himself: why not just run a cable all the way across the Atlantic?

Submarine telegraphy was then in its infancy, with a handful of subsea cables linking Britain to France, and connecting various points in the Mediterranean. Nobody had tried to lay a cable in the deep water of the Atlantic. But Field swiftly won the endorsements of both Matthew Maury, the founder of modern oceanography, and Samuel Morse, pioneer of the electric telegraph, and began raising money for his venture. After much lobbying he gained official backing from the American and Brit-

Culture 79

► ish governments. On the British side, a crucial role was played by the financial secretary to the British Treasury, who offered financial support and the use of British navy ships. The official in question was James Wilson, founder of The Economist—so in a sense this newspaper is a sibling of the Atlantic cable.

Amid a large cast of colourful characters, the villain of the piece is Edward “Wildman” Whitehouse, the original chief electrician of the project, who proved to be woefully unqualified for the role, and whose insistence that long-distance telegraphy was simply a matter of turning up the voltage had dire consequences. Mr Tabor’s story ranges widely, from the decks of cable-laying ships beset by storms, to shenanigans in corporate boardrooms, to the opulent mansions and hotels of 19th-century New York.

Compared with previous accounts, the focus of “Lightning Beneath the Sea” is on human drama and derring-do, rather than electrical theory or corporate finance. Mr Tabor charts the triumphs and disasters of the cable project in exhaustive yet thrilling detail, as almost everything that can possibly go wrong does, and Field and his team are forced to push electrical, nautical and financial limits. Despite the project’s vast scale, its workings are easy to grasp, since it boils down to spoiling long wires out of the back of ships.

A running theme is whether wiring up the world with submarine cables could help promote peace, which was one of Field’s original motivations. The celebratory messages sent between Queen Victoria and two American presidents, at various points in the tale, also expressed such hopes, as did many newspapers. Such hopes were of course dashed. In the modern era the notion that greater connectivity would promote peace has been espoused by Mark Zuckerberg, with equal lack of success. Lack of rapid communication is not the chief cause of conflict, as should be apparent to anyone who uses the internet.

The cable’s story also serves as a parable in another way. As the project progresses, the apparently impossible gradually starts to look feasible, and outlandish feats (such as recovering broken cables from the ocean floor) start to become routine, as new techniques and machinery are steadily refined. It is a reminder of the power of perseverance and innovation, and may bring to mind, for modern readers, such challenges as building fusion reactors, quantum computers or reusable rockets. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a science-fiction author who published his own account of the Atlantic cable in the 1950s and would later liken it to the Apollo programme, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” ■

Cinemas

Silver-screen time

Gen Z has rediscovered the joy of going to the movies

IT HAS BEEN an action-packed year on cinema screens—and at the ticket counter. Five films have already grossed more than $1bn at the global box office; three more have exceeded $500m. Forthcoming blockbusters such as “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three” promise epic showdowns; crowds are sure to show up to cinemas to watch the battles unfold. Although overall ticket sales are still down from pre-covid levels, analysts predict that the global box office will take $35bn this year, up 7% from 2025.

Indeed, the picture house seems to be enjoying something of a revival, thanks in part to the younger generations. Many feared that Gen Z and millennials would hasten cinema’s decline, preferring to stay at home and binge on Netflix, YouTube or TikTok. But in America nearly 90% of Gen Z went to the cinema in 2025, more than any other generation, according to a survey by Fandango, a ticketing website. They went seven times on average last year, compared with 6.1 times for Gen X and 5.7 for baby-boomers.

Young cinema-goers are propelling films to success. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, released on July 31st, set an opening-weekend record in North America, taking $360m to edge past “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), another superhero flick and the previous record holder. Almost two-thirds of its opening-weekend audience were 18- to

34-year-olds. The film has now made more than $1.7bn at cinemas worldwide.

It is not just superheroes that get youngsters super excited. Many made a pilgrimage to see Sir Christopher Nolan’s retelling of “The Odyssey”. Recent films such as “The Drama” (a dark romantic comedy), “Project Hail Mary” (a sci-fi yarn) and “Wuthering Heights” (a racy adaptation of a Victorian novel) have seen a similar skew. Gen Z’s fixation on “Obsession”, a horror film made by a 26-year-old, propelled it to $490m at the global box office—more than 650 times its budget.

The trend isn’t confined to the West, either. Under-30s make up more than half of the Hindi box office in India, according to Ormax Media, a consultancy. In Saudi Arabia two-thirds of cinema-goers are under 34; in Vietnam as many as 90% are. Last summer young Japanese flocked to “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle”, an anime blockbuster, helping give it the best opening weekend in the country’s history.

What explains this surge? Partly, cinema is being boosted by the technology some thought might kill it: social media. Online communities generate buzz—nearly half of European youngsters say they discover new films on TikTok. Viral trends coalesce around certain titles. For instance, “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in 2022, attracted hordes of young men in suits, who called themselves “GentleMinions”. ▶

img-112.jpeg

Lured into Spider-Man’s web

80 Culture

► During screenings of “A Minecraft Movie” in 2025, people screamed and jumped out of their seats.

Social media also create FOMO (fear of missing out). Letterboxd, an app which lets users log which films they’ve seen and share reviews, now has 30m users worldwide, almost three times the number in 2023, and its most active users are aged between 18 and 24. “The culture around films has become a youth culture again,” says Stephen Follows, a film-data analyst.

Gen Z has embraced the cinema as a place for shared experiences. Many organise group outings with friends, adding on dinner or drinks to make a special evening of it. Treating a cinema trip as an “event” in itself means they are spending more on add-ons such as novelty popcorn buckets and reclining seats. This is a boon for cinemas. At AMC, an American cinema chain, revenue per cinema-goer was 44% higher in the second quarter of 2026 than in the same quarter of 2019 (almost 11% higher,

after adjusting for inflation).

A generation that revels in nostalgia is embracing an analogue pleasure. For many, the big screen offers a reprieve from endlessly scrolling the little one. Susan Sontag, an American writer, once described the thrills of being “kidnapped by the movie” and, “To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theatre, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.” Young people, it turns out, are eager to go along for the ride. ■

BACK STORY

The dark underbelly of “Paw Patrol”

A debate over a hit cartoon sounds like culture-war madness. It is more than that

THEY MAY look like a pack of cutesy anthropomorphised dogs. “No job is too big,” vows their heartwarming motto, “no pup’s too small!” Don’t be fooled: some say the cartoon heroes of “Paw Patrol” are covert outriders for authoritarian capitalism. “Keep trying, everybody makes mistakes,” a winsome character urges in their latest outing, “Paw Patrol: the Dino Movie”. The haters have a slogan too: “Defund the Paw Patrol!”

If you haven’t had a pre-school child (or been one) since “Paw Patrol” first aired on TV in 2013, it may have passed you by. But it is a world-conquering juggernaut, spanning more than a dozen seasons, a toy empire and now three theatrical film releases. Critics—perhaps including parents aggrieved at enduring so much schlock—have avidly dissected its subliminal messages. Hearing about this is like coming late to the manosphere; both, you find, are amazingly popular and allegedly pernicious.

For the blissfully uninitiated: the show is set in idyllic but slightly creepy Adventure Bay, where children drive and puppies talk. Led by a lavishly quiffed ten-year-old boy, a group of heroic pups respond to mild emergencies, setting off down a fun slide at their HQ. It is utterly formulaic, with incessant catchphrases (“Paw Patrol is on a roll!”) and appalling earworm music. “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children”, wrote C.S. Lewis, “is a bad children’s story.” He would not have liked “Paw Patrol”.

The main baddies are a guy called Humdinger and his villainous kittens (the franchise is an extended libel against cats). In the first movie, he takes over the metropolis of Adventure City and installs rollercoaster loops in the subway. In the second, a fallen meteor gives the pups magic powers. In the new

img-113.jpeg

film they wash up on an island inhabited by dinosaurs: some huge, some petite and sweet, none apparently carnivorous. Humdinger covets the island’s diamonds.

Superficially, if “Paw Patrol” has politics, they are clunkily left-wing. Humdinger is a blond narcissist who has his own plane, builds a phallic tower and disdains “free and fair elections” and the law. The pups protect the environment as well as people and creatures; they are surprisingly keen on recycling. The saccharine morals—about teamwork, facing your fears and other such soppy uplift—are vaguely leftish in today’s dog-eat-dog world.

But that may just be what they want you to think. Of the core gang of six pups, some critics note, only one is a girl, whose outfit and even eyes are pink. Worse, the top dog, Chase, is a police pup, so the whole thing is pro-police “copaganda”. Actually, since the patrol are unaccountable freelancers to whom a ditzy mayor defers, it is a sly advert for privatised state services. (Their funds come from merchandising, runs a winking joke—which may grate with those forking out for it.)

In short, fulminated a Guardian commentator, “Paw Patrol” is “authoritarian neoliberal propaganda”. An academic reckoned it “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities”. Rallying to the show’s defence, a former White House spokesperson wrongly claimed it had been cancelled. It is very tempting to dismiss the whole debate as killjoy hogwash and culture-war lunacy.

Tempting, but mistaken. It isn’t only that. There is, after all, a reason dictators try to control the stories told to the young. “Give me the child until he is seven”, the Jesuits’ founder supposedly said, “and I will show you the man.” Books, films and, yes, cartoons impart values and lessons. A sensation like “Paw Patrol” is doing a lot of imparting, and evidently resonating with youngsters everywhere. The takeaways of a critical theorist, however, may not be those of a four-year-old unfamiliar with Ayn Rand.

To understand the deep meaning of “Paw Patrol”, the best tool may not be ideology but psychoanalysis. One of its tenets is that many children want desperately to heal their parents, partly for their own well-being, sometimes taking on parental roles themselves. This is the psychic backdrop to tales of young protagonists fixing grown-up woes, from Enid Blyton to Harry Potter.

The “Paw Patrol” generation have overheard their parents freaking out about politics, war, inflation, the coronavirus and climate change. The action is stuffed with pre-school wish fulfilment, as the pups—avatars for the viewers—eat unlimited treats and play unsupervised with super-cool kit. Perhaps another wish it powerfully fulfils is for kids to be able to solve their elders’ problems. No pup’s too small to notice them.

81

Economic & financial indicators

Gross domestic product Consumer prices Unemployment rate Current-account balance % of GDP, 2026† Budget balance % of GDP, 2026† Interest rates 10-yr giv't bonds latest, % change on year ago, bp Currency units
% change on year ago latest quarter* 2026† % change on year ago latest 2026† % per $ % change on year ago
United States 2.1 Q2 1.5 2.1 3.4 Jul 3.2 4.1 Jul -3.5 -6.5 4.7 39.0
China 4.3 Q2 3.6 4.7 0.5 Jul 1.0 5.0 Jun** 3.2 -5.4 1.5 -13.0
Japan 0.4 Q1 1.8 0.7 1.7 Jun 1.8 2.5 Jun 3.6 -1.8 2.9 134
Britain 1.2 Q2 1.7 1.1 2.6 Jun 3.2 4.9 Apr** -3.6 -5.1 5.0 38.0
Canada -0.1 Q1 -0.1 0.8 2.8 Jun 2.6 6.4 Jul -0.4 -2.1 3.7 25.0
Euro area 1.0 Q2 1.8 0.8 2.9 Jul 2.8 6.3 Jun 2.3 -3.4 3.2 43.0
Austria 0.9 Q1 0.8* 0.8 2.6 Jul 3.0 5.7 Jun 1.1 -4.1 3.4 29.0
Belgium 0.5 Q2 nil 0.7 3.5 Jul 3.6 6.3 Jun -2.8 -5.4 3.7 52.0
France 0.7 Q2 0.7 0.7 2.4 Jul 2.3 8.2 Jun -0.4 -5.3 4.0 59.0
Germany 0.9 Q2 0.9 0.9 2.8 Jul 2.7 3.9 Jun 4.5 -4.2 3.2 43.0
Greece 2.0 Q1 1.0 2.0 2.7 Jul 3.7 8.0 Jun -5.5 0.8 3.8 39.0
Italy 1.0 Q2 0.8 0.8 2.9 Jul 2.6 5.7 Jun 0.8 -3.0 4.0 39.0
Netherlands 1.3 Q2 1.6 1.0 3.0 Jul 3.1 3.8 Jun 9.3 -2.6 3.3 36.0
Spain 2.7 Q2 2.8 2.6 3.8 Jul 3.3 10.1 Jun 2.4 -2.5 3.6 35.0
Czech Republic 2.2 Q1 0.8 2.0 1.7 Jul 2.0 3.0 Q1* 0.3 -2.6 4.8 51.0
Denmark 6.2 Q1 6.2 3.3 1.7 Jul 2.0 3.1 Jun 12.1 1.3 2.9 31.0
Norway 1.7 Q1 1.4 1.3 3.0 Jul 3.2 4.5 May** 14.8 9.0 4.4 48.0
Poland 3.5 Q1 2.4 3.4 3.0 Jul 2.6 5.8 Jun* -1.4 -7.0 5.9 50.0
Russia 1.3 Q2 na 0.5 6.0 Jul 6.4 2.2 Jun* 2.2 -3.2 15.7 187
Sweden 2.5 Q2 5.7 2.1 0.2 Jul 1.7 9.9 Jun* 5.5 -2.3 3.0 61.0
Switzerland 0.5 Q1 2.6 1.0 0.4 Jul 0.5 3.1 Jul 6.9 0.2 0.5 19.0
Turkey 2.5 Q1 0.5 2.4 31.8 Jul 32.1 7.4 Jun* -3.0 -3.6 32.3 307
Australia 2.5 Q1 1.1 1.6 3.8 Jun 3.9 4.4 Jun -3.0 -1.5 4.9 70.0
Hong Kong 4.3 Q2 -2.4 5.0 1.9 Jun 2.3 3.7 Jun** 4.6 -2.5 3.6 59.0
India 7.8 Q1 6.4 6.5 4.4 Jul 4.8 6.2 Jul -1.6 -4.5 6.8 30.0
Indonesia 5.3 Q2 4.4 5.0 2.9 Jul 3.5 4.7 Feb* -1.6 -3.5 7.2 79.0
Malaysia 5.8 Q2 8.5 5.3 1.9 Jun 2.0 3.0 Jun* 3.4 -3.5 3.7 36.0
Pakistan 4.8 2026** na 3.0 9.2 Jul 9.0 6.9 2025 -1.1 -4.7 12.0 -2.0
Philippines 2.3 Q2 2.4 2.7 6.2 Jul 6.8 4.7 Q2* -4.0 -6.3 7.3 119
Singapore 5.9 Q2 5.7 5.1 1.9 Jun 2.0 2.0 Q2 16.0 1.3 2.3 33.0
South Korea 3.7 Q2 2.5 3.3 2.8 Jul 2.8 2.6 Jul* 13.6 -1.9 4.3 148
Taiwan 12.9 Q2 9.9 10.8 2.5 Jul 2.0 3.3 Jun 26.6 1.8 1.9 57.0
Thailand 2.8 Q1 2.7 2.3 1.9 Jul 2.3 0.9 Jun* nil -5.5 2.0 62.0
Argentina 2.3 Q1 3.0 3.0 33.5 Jun 32.4 7.8 Q1* -0.4 0.1 na na
Brazil 1.8 Q1 4.5 2.0 4.4 Jul 4.8 5.4 Jun*** -2.6 -7.3 14.7 95.0
Chile -0.5 Q1 -1.1 1.4 3.5 Jul 3.9 9.4 Jun*** -1.2 -2.3 5.6 3.0
Colombia 2.2 Q1 2.4 2.5 6.0 Jul 5.7 8.0 Jun* -2.4 -6.6 11.9 15.0
Mexico 2.2 Q2 6.1 0.9 3.1 Jul 3.9 2.8 Jun -0.4 -3.8 9.1 -3.0
Peru 3.5 Q1 3.2 2.8 4.1 Jul 4.0 5.2 Jun* 2.2 -2.4 6.1 17.0
Egypt 5.0 Q1 -24.0 4.6 14.9 Jul 13.8 5.8 Q2* -4.7 -6.0 25.6 50.0
Israel 1.7 Q1 -3.8 3.1 1.6 Jun 2.2 2.9 Jun 1.8 -4.5 3.8 -39.0
Saudi Arabia 4.6 2025 na 0.2 1.8 Jul 2.1 3.1 Q1 -3.6 -6.9 na na
South Africa 1.9 Q1 2.2 1.5 4.8 Jun 4.5 33.6 Q2* -0.7 -4.4 8.6 -106

Source: Haver Analytics % change on previous quarter; annual rate †The Economist Intelligence Unit estimate/forecast Not seasonally adjusted †New series Year ending June ††Latest 3 months 3-month moving average **5-year yield †††Dollar-denominated bonds. Note: Euro-area consumer prices are harmonised

Markets

In local currency Index Aug 12th % change on: one week Dec 31st 2025
United States S&P 500 7,748.5 0.3 13.2
United States NAS Comp 26,588.5 0.9 14.4
China Shanghai Comp 3,946.7 1.8 -0.6
China Shenzhen Comp 2,607.0 2.7 3.0
Japan Nikkei 225 67,524.1 1.8 34.1
Japan Topix 4,139.0 2.3 21.4
Britain FTSE 100 10,833.2 -0.5 9.1
Canada S&P TSX 36,662.1 1.4 15.6
Euro area EURO STOXX 50 6,534.0 0.9 12.8
France CAC 40 8,674.9 0.1 6.4
Germany DAX* 26,331.1 0.8 7.5
Italy FTSE/MIB 53,698.7 0.5 19.5
Netherlands AEX 1,112.3 0.1 16.9
Spain IBEX 35 20,204.4 0.7 16.7
Poland WIG 153,948.2 1.9 31.3
Russia RTS, $ terms 873.5 -2.5 -21.2
Switzerland S&P 14,449.5 -0.7 8.9
Turkey BIST 14,110.1 3.0 25.3
Australia All Ord. 9,404.7 nil 4.3
Hong Kong Hang Seng 25,440.2 -1.8 -0.7
India BSE 77,966.4 -0.8 -8.5
Indonesia IDX 6,373.9 0.4 -26.3
Malaysia KLSE 1,741.6 -0.4 3.7
Index Aug 12th % change on: one week Dec 31st 2025
Pakistan KSE 180,311.3 0.2 3.6
Singapore STI 5,720.8 2.5 23.1
South Korea HOSPI 6,579.0 -0.3 56.1
Taiwan TWI 45,518.1 2.0 57.2
Thailand SET 1,612.6 0.2 28.0
Argentina MERV 2,999,524.0 -5.0 -1.7
Brazil BVSP* 167,491.1 -5.8 4.0
Mexico IPC 65,755.9 -1.2 2.3
Egypt EGX 30 55,039.8 0.7 31.6
Israel TA-125 4,065.2 1.0 11.0
Saudi Arabia Tadawul 10,844.1 -0.4 3.4
South Africa JSE AS 114,980.9 -0.4 -0.7
World, dev'd MSCI 5,008.5 0.5 13.0
Emerging markets MSCI 1,681.9 -0.3 19.8
US corporate bonds, spread over Treasuries
Basis points latest Dec 31st 2025
Investment grade 93 93
High-yield 320 354

Sources: LSEG Workspace; Moscow Exchange; Standard & Poor's Global Fixed Income Research *Total return index

Commodities

The Economist commodity-price index % change on year
2020=100 Aug 4th Aug 11th* month
Dollar Index
All items 150.7 152.1 -0.1 13.7
Food 149.9 149.1 -3.2 2.9
Industrials
All 151.2 154.5 2.6 24.1
Non-food agricultural 151.7 151.3 -0.9 21.4
Metals 151.1 155.4 3.5 24.8
Sterling Index
All items 144.0 144.7 -0.8 13.5
Euro Index
All items 149.4 150.5 -0.9 14.8
Gold
$ per oz 4,084.5 4,392.1 7.4 31.3
Brent
$ per barrel 79.3 89.0 4.9 34.5

Sources: CME Group; LME; LSEG Workspace; NOREXECO; NZ Wool Services; S&P Global Commodity Insights; Thompson Lloyd & Ewart; USDA *Provisional

For historical indicators data, visit economist.com/economic-and-financial-indicators

82

Nirmal (“Nims”) Purja

The Gurkha mountaineer and Netflix star died in an avalanche on July 30th, aged 43

img-114.jpeg

HIS CLIMBING career was still young when Nirmal Purja went up Dhaulagiri, the seventh-highest peak in the world. He had been born in a village in its foothills, in a house shared with chickens, but the family had moved to Nepal’s lowland south when he was five. So he had barely registered the magnificent wall of rock and snow, 8,167 metres of it, filling the horizon. Now, at 30, he was one of a climbing party toiling across it.

He took his turn, of course, at trailblazing. And as he went, plunging knee-high into the snow, he was learning something extraordinary about himself. The altitude didn’t seem to be affecting him. He was strong. Each step arrived with power. Boom! Boom! Boom! Soon, the rest of the party were little black dots far below. He was in the flow. In the zone, bro! By the end he had trailblazed 70% of the route. It was more sensible to share the task, and he accepted that. But if there were mountains to climb, he wanted to do it now. And do it fast, because he could.

His whole purpose in life was to perform feats others thought impossible. He became world-famous when, in 2019, he left the British army (where he was a Gurkha and in the Special Forces) to climb all 14 mountains over 8,000 metres. That was the Death Zone, in which the unassisted human body began to fail. It took him six months and six days; the previous record was more than seven years. He had laboured to find funding, but Project Possible, as he called it, was taken up by Netflix. They made it into a documentary, he wrote it up in a book, and thus he became a star. Billboards of him perching on summits, with the sun dazzling off his stylish reflector glasses, appeared in Manhattan. He was mobbed at airports, and in Nepal he was shawled as a hero. Though ignorant of alcohol until he was 26, he came to like Taittinger champagne. Western climbers hoping to be guided singly by him on one of his Elite Expeditions could expect to pay a million dollars.

Because he lived to climb, the challenges went on. He specialised in ballsy back-to-back ascents, he and his Sherpa teams barely drawing breath between them. Mountains could be climbed in different combinations, or repeatedly. Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, was topped in 18 hours just four days after climbing Everest, and much of that time had been spent celebrating,

ing, not sleeping. He climbed Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest, in one hit in 21 hours with a stinking hangover from summitting Dhaulagiri three days before.

The array of great 8,000-ers drew him back again and again. This is yours, Nims. He travelled light, sometimes without food or sleeping bag, with a thermos of hot water to melt snow to drink. There was just time to appreciate the view from their summits, especially the orange and pink of sunrise with the wispy clouds blowing away, before he got on with descending. But Everest didn’t have a particular lure for him. His first attempt on it in 2016 had been unwise, a quick-as-possible solo climb (crazy, everyone said), in which he, not yet a badass trailblazer, had met altitude sickness so bad that his wheezing lungs soon forced him down. He later went up with ease time after time, but hated the crowds and the rubbish. The better mountain to conquer was K2, the world’s second-highest, in winter. That had never been done, and he did it with an all-Nepali team who sang the national anthem at the top, proving how splendid Sherpa climbers were.

Critics had a field day with his climbing style. He used bottled oxygen and fixed ropes, and hopped on helicopters to get from one base camp to another. Purists scorned all that. Rather than racing up mountains, they said, he ought to be finding new routes. He waved it all off, especially the gripe about oxygen. If he didn’t carry it, he couldn’t rescue the many climbers he found whose oxygen had run out. In any case, he could climb an 8,000-er without bottled air too, and often did, just to give the carers a good two-finger salute. As for stardom, this was not about him, brother. The whole point of Project Possible was to show people everywhere what they could achieve if they set their minds to it; how to conquer their own mountains, whatever those were.

Few climbers were as fit for it as he was. He had started training at his English-medium boarding school, doing runs at night to be sure of getting into the Gurkhas as his father and brothers had done. In civilian life, he would swim 100 lengths after work. Once a soldier at Catterick, bullied by British squaddies for his accent and his dark skin, he set out to prove he could join any elite force. Yomping one day in the Welsh hills, carrying a 75-lb pack on his back, he felt extra-inspired when the instructor added another rock. Quitting is not in the blood, sir.

He had close brushes with death, too. The first came when, as a member of the Special Forces, a bullet from a sniper threw him off a roof, smashed his rifle butt and sliced across his jaw. The most memorable came on Nanga Parbat, when for a second he let go of a rope. As he tumbled, building up speed, his ice axe failing to get purchase in the snow, he expected to die, but caught a lower section of the rope in time. Scared of dying? No way. Everyone had to die sometime. He didn’t make much of the juniper-burning and rice-throwing that Sherpas did before their ascents; his approach was military, 100% attack. But before he climbed he liked to have a conversation with the mountain, alone. He would address the wall of rock and ice and ask, “Can I go, or not?”

Annapurna said yes, early in his career, and then sent down an avalanche that almost wiped out his team. But he kept up the habit. On Broad Peak this summer he asked the same question of that mountain, where recent snowfall had put other climbers off. Whatever answer he initially received, on July 30th another avalanche carried him and his party away. He had almost completed a third round of all the 8,000-ers, the second one without bottled air. The mountain, in the end, had the last word. ■

ECONOMIST ENTERPRISE

img-115.jpeg

Physical AI and Robotics Summit

October 13th 2026 • London

More than: 300 attendees

70 speakers

35 case studies

The next AI revolution won't happen on a screen, but in factories, warehouses, hospitals and cities.

Physical AI is leaving the lab and entering the workplace. Discover how organisations are deploying robotics at scale, and what this means for productivity, competitiveness and growth.

Morgan Roe Chief operating officer Engineered Arts

Gianpiero Negri Global head, Robotics Safety Centre of Excellence Amazon

Amber van Groenestijn Global robotics lead The HEINEKEN Company

Marco Iannone Group chief AI officer Virgin Active

Isabella Panella Head of robotics industrial operations JLR

James Appathurai Deputy assistant secretary general for cyber, digital transformation and hybrid NATO

Save 25% with code ECON25

physical-ai-and-robotics.economist.com*

Gold sponsor

MYTHIC

AI with a business CV

Trusted by 44,000+ businesses

img-116.jpeg

ORACLE NetSuite

img-117.jpeg

🔍 解读视角：本篇基于现象学本质直观、法兰克福学派批判理论（阿多诺/哈贝马斯）与批判话语分析（CDA）传统展开。

制度与权力批判深度研判：The Economist (2026-08-16)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有国际政治、经济、社会与文化报道后，以下 4 个具体事件在思想史、文化政治与制度伦理层面最值得学者进一步深思：

  1. 胚胎多基因筛选（PGT-P）的伦理争议 [F1_15 🔍]

    • 事件简述：社论讨论夫妇是否应被允许基于疾病抗性和智商（IQ）来选择胚胎，并提及硅谷希望重塑人类制造方式的趋势。
    • 思想文化深思切入点：探讨“定制化”婴儿如何将生命起点转化为一种可量化的优化目标，分析技术理性如何将基因决定论转化为一种潜在的社会分层机制。

  2. 中国城市管控中的“安全剧场”现象 [F2_41 🔍]

    • 事件简述：报道分析了某种对安全性的过度痴迷（The obsession with safety theatre），探讨管控措施的可见性与实际效能之间的关系。
    • 思想文化深思切入点：分析“安全剧场”作为一种权力表演的逻辑——其目的可能不在于实际消除风险，而在于通过可见的管控仪式感，向公众确认权力的在场。

  3. 印度统一民法（UCC）与宗教法律冲突 [F2_33 🔍]

    • 事件简述：报道涉及印度穆斯林婚姻（Muslim marriage in India）及其在法律框架下的处境。
    • 思想文化深思切入点：揭示主权国家在构建统一法律身份时，普遍主义话语与少数群体文化特权/传统之间的张力。

  4. AI 慈善事业的资本逻辑 [F1_13 🔍][F2_43 🔍]

    • 事件简述：AI 创始人承诺捐出数千亿美元，引发关于这些资金将如何使用以及其背后意图的讨论。
    • 思想文化深思切入点：分析技术巨头通过大规模慈善实现对未来社会议程的预设，探讨资本如何通过“捐赠”将私有权力转化为公共治理的合法性。

▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：生物资本主义的逻辑起点：从“疾病预防”到“潜能定制”的伦理滑坡

在当代生物技术的语境下，胚胎多基因筛选（PGT-P）的讨论 [F1_15 🔍] 揭示了一个深刻的伦理悖论。当筛选标准从“排除严重遗传疾病”扩展至“选择高智商（IQ）”时，生育行为的本质发生了质变：它从一种基于偶然性与接纳的生命之礼，异化为一种基于绩效指标的“产品定制”。

这种转变的核心在于将人类生命潜能简化为一组可量化的概率分布。硅谷试图重塑人类制造方式的愿景 [F1_15 🔍]，实际上是将生物学特征转化为一种新型的“生物资本”。在这种逻辑下，智商、身高或抗病能力不再是自然的馈赠，而成了可以通过经济手段获取的竞争优势。

引入哈贝马斯的视角，这种“定制化”直接挑战了人的“道德自主性”。当一个人的基本生物特质是被父母预先选定的，他便在某种程度上成为了他人设计目标的执行者。这种关系将原本平等的父母-子女关系，转化为一种设计者-产品之间的不对称关系。如果这种技术被广泛商业化，社会流动性可能不再取决于后天的努力或机会的均等，而将被生物学预设所锁死，从而在生物学层面完成阶级的固化。

专题二：安全剧场的权力美学：仪式化管控与可见性的治理逻辑

针对“安全剧场”（Safety Theatre）的痴迷 [F2_41 🔍]，提供了一个剖析现代权力运作的绝佳样本。这种现象的核心矛盾在于，管控措施的实际效能（捕捉风险）与管控的可见度（仪式感）之间存在严重的脱节。

在权力运行的逻辑中，这种“剧场化”的管控并非单纯的低效，而是一种特定的治理策略。通过制造可见的、具有仪式感的检查流程，权力在物理空间中实现了对个体的重新定义——每个人在进入公共空间前，必须先经过权力的“确认”与“过滤”。这种仪式感将公共空间转化为一个高度受控的行政区域，实现了权力对生活世界的深度介入。

从福柯的“规训”视角来看，这种安检不再是简单的安全检查，而是一种微观权力的空间实践。一个深刻的洞见是：在数字化监控（如人脸识别、大数据）已经实现隐形覆盖的时代，依然保留低效的物理安检，恰恰说明了权力对“可见性”的依赖。权力不仅需要实际地掌控，更需要让被掌控者在肉体上感受到这种掌控的沉重。这种“安全剧场”实际上是权力在数字化时代的一种补偿性表演，旨在通过制造物理上的不便，来弥补隐形监控所带来的权力感知缺失。

▌ 面向学者的开放性思想追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Scholarly Inquiry)

  1. 【关于生物阶级的制度性研究】：当PGT-P等技术导致生物学优势与经济资本高度重合时，现有的基于“机会均等”的法律体系如何重新定义“平等”？是否需要建立一种“基因反歧视法”来对抗生物资本主义的阶级固化？
  2. 【关于权力可见性的悖论研究】：在全方位数字化监控的时代，为何国家权力依然倾向于维持低效的、仪式化的物理管控（如安全剧场）？这种“可见的权力”与“隐形的算法”之间是如何协同运作以达成治理目标的？
🔍 解读视角：本篇基于制度理性架构（Logos）与生活世界集体情感（Pathos）内在辩证机制展开。

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The Economist (2026-08-16)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在生活世界痛感、情感政治动员与制度理性冲突层面最值得学者进一步深思：

  1. 【胚胎多基因筛选（PGT-P）的商业化】 [F1_15, F1_18]

    • 事件简述：社论讨论夫妇应被允许基于疾病抗性和智商（IQ）来选择胚胎，且硅谷希望重塑人类的制造方式 [F1_15 🔍]。
    • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：这揭示了技术理性如何将育儿从情感纽带转化为一种追求性能指标的“产品定制”，触及了人类对随机性的恐惧与对绝对掌控的追求。

  2. 【阿富汗政权五年后的生存图景】 [F1_8 🔍]

    • 事件简述：阿富汗比半个世纪以来任何时候都更安全，但其人民正在遭受苦难且日益孤立 [F1_8 🔍]。
    • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：一种极端的悖论——制度端宣称的“安全”秩序理性，与生活世界中“遭受苦难”的肉身痛感之间的撕裂。

  3. 【中国城市安检的“安全剧场”】 [F2_41 🔍]

    • 事件简述：关于“安全剧场（Safety Theatre）”的讨论，剖析通过仪式性管控制造的掌控感 [F2_41 🔍]。
    • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：制度理性通过制造可见的、仪式性的管控来向外界展示掌控力，而这种仪式感是以牺牲个体的微观时间成本与心理便捷为代价的。

▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：生物资本主义的逻辑僭越：PGT-P技术中“优化理性”与“亲缘情感”的异化辩证

在当代生物技术的演进中，胚胎多基因筛选（PGT-P）的讨论标志着一种“技术官僚理性”开始介入人类繁衍的生命伦理。从制度与商业逻辑来看，PGT-P 遵循的是一种量化优化模型：将人类的智商（IQ）及疾病抗性简化为可筛选的指标 [F1_15 🔍]。在这种 Logos 的架构下，胚胎在某种程度上被视为一组待筛选的“性能参数”。硅谷试图通过这种方式“重塑人类的制造方式” [F1_15 🔍]，将生物学上的优化视为一种提升后代竞争力的理性手段。

然而，这种优化理性在生活世界的真实痛感面前引发了深刻的伦理焦虑。当“定制化”婴儿被赞美为一种进步时 [F1_18 🔍]，其背后驱动的是一种深层的生存焦虑。在这种情感动员下，父母对孩子的爱面临被异化为“质量控制”的风险。生活世界的 Pathos 在这里表现为一种隐秘的恐惧：恐惧孩子在未来的社会分层中因基因缺陷而被抛弃。这种情感被技术逻辑捕捉，导致亲缘关系从一种“无条件的接纳”转向了“基于条件的筛选”。

Logos 与 Pathos 的摩擦在此达到了顶点：制度理性试图通过消除“缺陷”来创造“完美”，但这种对完美的追求恰恰制造了新的异化。当个体的存在被定义为在筛选中胜出的“高分”结果，其自我认同将不再基于个体的生命体验，而基于一个预设的算法指标。这种逻辑实际上是对人类尊严的深刻消解，将生命本身变成了资本积累与性能优化的延伸。

专题二：秩序的幻象与肉身的真实：阿富汗“安全叙事”与“生存痛感”的撕裂

在关于阿富汗政权的研判中，我们观察到一种典型的制度理性与生活世界痛感的剧烈撕裂。从治理逻辑（Logos）来看，该政权构建了一套基于强力管控的“秩序模型”，使得阿富汗在物理层面“比半个世纪以来任何时候都更安全” [F1_8 🔍]。在这种叙事中，安全被量化为暴力事件的减少和政权稳定性的增强。这种理性模型追求的是一种“静态的稳定”，将国家视为一个需要被高效管理、排除干扰的封闭系统。

然而，这种宏观的“安全”在微观的生活世界（Lifeworld）中却被感知为一种令人窒息的孤立与绝望。报纸明确指出，尽管物理安全提升，但其“人民正在遭受苦难且日益孤立” [F1_8 🔍]。对于处于苦难中的个体来说，制度端所标榜的“安全”是一种毫无意义的修辞，因为这种安全是以剥夺基本生存权和社会参与权为代价的。

这种辩证摩擦揭示了“秩序”与“正义”的根本冲突。制度理性将“无战争”等同于“成功”，而生活世界的 Pathos 则在呐喊：没有基本生存保障的安全是另一种形式的暴力。报纸在社论中讨论民主国家是否仍应与其接触 [F1_8 🔍]，其话语温度处于外交层面的理性权衡，而阿富汗人民的生存状态则是极端的痛感。当制度理性完全脱离了对人类基本生存痛感的感知，它所维持的不再是社会秩序，而是一座由恐惧与孤立构建的精致监狱。

▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Ethical & Sociological Inquiry)

  1. 【关于生物决定论与社会流动性的追问】：当 PGT-P 等技术将智商等特质转化为可筛选的生物资本时，传统的“教育公平”逻辑是否将面临失效？我们应如何构建伦理框架，以防止人类演变为基于基因分值的“生物种姓制度”？
  2. 【关于“安全剧场”与治理合法性的追问】：在当代城市治理中，像“安全剧场” [F2_41 🔍] 这样通过制造可见的管控来补偿真实安全感的缺失，在长期内是增强了民众的信任，还是加速了生活世界对制度理性的犬儒化？