The Economist Media Bias for Past 90 Days

Making dough: how corporate America created the chocolate chip cookie

Along with hot dogs, burgers and apple pie, the chocolate chip cookie is one of the stars of American comfort cuisine. Yet like many American foods, its origins lie elsewhere. And contrary to their contemporary reputation as items of indulgence, biscuits used to be seen as a health food.
The Economist     Mar 08, 2021

Evangelicals are divided over the movement's support for Donald Trump

religion and belief

SET IN THE bucolic countryside on the edge of Nashville, Christ Presbyterian Church is a stately building where, in normal times, hundreds of evangelical Christians gather to worship. On a recent Sunday a smaller, socially distanced congregation assembled to hear the preacher speak on the eighth chapter of the gospel of Mark, in which Jesus asks his disciples: “Who do people say I am?” Such questions of identity are troubling many in the congregation, too.Chatting after the service, Samantha Fisher, a mother of two who works in public relations, sums up the current moment: “I don’t know any more what it means to be a Christian and an American.” White evangelicals like Ms Fisher are undergoing an identity crisis that has been a long time in the making, but has crystallised during four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and, especially, with the violent uprising at the Capitol on January 6th. Images of activists waving flags with Christian messages, praying in the name of Jesus inside the Senate chamber and claiming to defend America as “a Christian nation”, have left many evangelicals angry and confused.About 80% of white evangelicals supported Mr Trump in 2016 and at least 75% di...
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

It is possible to build houses cheaply in the Bay Area

lifestyle and leisure

THE BUILDING at 833 Bryant street in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa neighbourhood will be unusual. To start with, all the inhabitants of its 146 units will previously have been homeless. Its constituent parts will have been prefabricated, constructed miles away and fitted together on-site like puzzle pieces. Most unusually, the project will have been cheap to build, at least by Bay Area standards. A report by the Terner Centre at University of California, Berkeley found that, once completed in July, the project will cost 25% less per unit than comparable ones. That is an achievement in California, where per-unit construction costs for supposedly affordable housing have ballooned since 2000; they are now the highest in the country. Subsidies for below-market-rate housing come with strings attached. Affordable developments that take public funds may be forced to install solar panels, contract with small businesses, or enlarge balcony spaces: well-intentioned demands that nonetheless drive up costs. Builders need to work with a patchwork of local and state agencies that sometimes impose unclear or inconsistent requirements. Mercy Housing, the builder of 833 Bryant, was able to avoid the...
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

How the $1.9trn stimulus plan will be trimmed by senators

politics

IT LOOKED LIKE good timing at first. On February 27th the House of Representatives passed the maiden legislative hope of President Joe Biden, a behemoth $1.9trn package for covid-19 relief. It was speedy because it was unimpeded by any serious bipartisan negotiating—the legislation mirrored the White House’s proposal almost exactly, with not one Republican vote to show for it. That left more than two weeks for the Senate to pass the proposal before a self-imposed March 14th deadline, when emergency federal unemployment benefits for 11m Americans from the last round of stimulus will start to expire. Unfortunately for the president, smooth-sailing legislation has a habit of getting stuck in the Senate. A brittle Democratic majority and obscure parliamentary procedures in the chamber promise a lengthier drama. Perfect party unity among Democrats would be needed to achieve a simple majority in the Senate. (It would be an unexpected coup for Mr Biden if even a single Republican voted in favour.) For normal legislation, that would spell instant defeat because of the filibuster, a parliamentary procedure that raises the effective threshold for passage to 60 votes out of 100. To get round ...
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

Black American radicals once forged links with Chinese communists

politics

ON FEBRUARY 23RD, from a basement in Queens, New York, a little-known organisation announced that China would be receiving a special honour. “We present [the] People’s Republic of China with the H.R. 1242 Resilience Project W.E.B. Du Bois Award,” wrote the group’s president, Victor Mooney, in a letter to the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations. The award celebrates China’s donation of the Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine to African countries. “W.E.B. Du Bois is a vivid reminder that China is a brother to Africa and African-Americans,” Mr Mooney added. In a time of strained relations between America and China, Mr Mooney’s olive branch is unusual. But then so is Mr Mooney. He claims to be the first African-American to have rowed across the Atlantic, braving boat-slapping sharks and boat-pinching pirates (the international arbiter of such challenges, the Ocean Rowing Society, does not recognise his efforts). He is an ally of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s longest-serving despot. Perhaps it then says something that it is Mr Mooney alone who is trying to resurrect a long-forgotten friendship between black activists and the Chinese Communist Party (...
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

Poor countries struggling with debt fight to get help

economy and finances

ON THE MORNING of November 13th last year Zambia’s vice-president told parliament, “This country will not default.” Hours later the inevitable happened. Having destroyed its relationship with the IMF, struggled to provide clear data on its borrowing from China and failed to win a reprieve from bondholders, Zambia missed a deadline to pay interest and defaulted on its debt. Lenders could only shake their heads in bemusement. For some poor countries like Zambia, a debt crisis has always been the story of a chaotic and corrupt government that has borrowed carelessly. But in the more complex creditor landscape of today, defaults can also, more than ever, be about struggling nations stuck in the web of diplomatic feuds that bind their creditors together. Each lender enters restructuring talks with the same preoccupation: is someone else getting a better deal? No one wants to be first to give concessions and there is little advantage in showing your hand. More than financial data or legal frameworks, it is these power struggles that have come to define restructuring negotiations. The pandemic has left many countries struggling to repay their debt. As well as Zambia, five others—Argentin...
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

After the tsunami: what happened to the girl from Fukushima?

disaster and accident

In Japanese folklore earthquakes are caused by a catfish, Namazu, that lives beneath the island archipelago and occasionally swishes his tail. He does so with ominous timing. In 1855 Japan was rocked by a big earthquake soon after American trading ships arrived on its shores, heralding the end of nearly three centuries of self-isolation. Namazu has historically been seen as a mischievous beast. Even when his thrashings don’t accompany events of earth-shattering importance, they often shake up a complacent elite and rebalance cosmic forces in favour of ordinary people.
The Economist     Mar 04, 2021

Baking tofu with David Duchovny

Food

David Duchovny is making a mess of things. He is cooking sticky tofu and has cut his block of bean curd into neat cubes without reading the recipe first. When he finally does so, he realises that he has missed a crucial step: pressing the excess water out, which he has to do before chopping, so that the tofu crisps up in the oven. Then he notices that he needs parchment paper, which he doesn’t have, and garlic, which he can’t find. Rifling through his cupboards in search of the elusive alliums, he turns to the camera with a wry smile. “This could be a disaster.”
The Economist     Mar 03, 2021

Tag: CHEP

Health

I am very excited to announce that I have joined the FTI Consulting team. An excerpt from the press release is below. WASHINGTON, March 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — FTI Consulting, Inc. (NYSE: FCN) today announced the appointment of Jason Shafrin, Ph.D. as a Senior Managing Director in the Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy within the firm’s Economic Consulting segment. Dr. Shafrin, who will…
The Economist     Mar 01, 2021

The first fitness influencer

Tech

When Eugen Sandow (pictured) opened his first School of Physical Culture in London in the summer of 1897, he ensured that its decor matched his personal brand. On arrival at 32A St James’s Street, visitors found themselves facing a life-sized statue of the founder himself. A nearby oil painting depicted Sandow as an ancient gladiator. In both cases his sculpted physique evoked the spirit of Greek classicism that Sandow, regarded in his heyday as the “perfect man”, strove to embody.
The Economist     Mar 01, 2021

What if we’ve forgotten how to socialise?

During a rare excursion to a clothes shop I took last month, an older woman walked in, looked around at the other shoppers and exclaimed, “humans!” It was an unusual moment of bonding with strangers. Mostly I just hold my breath as people squeeze past me at the supermarket.
The Economist     Feb 26, 2021

Smuggled into the covid-relief bill is an overdue fix for Obamacare

social issue

WHEN DEMOCRATS enacted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, they wanted to limit costs to keep moderates on board. Hence the ACA, which gives subsidies to people who do not get health insurance from their employer to buy it on government-run exchanges, restricts its benefits to people who earn less than four times the federal poverty line. For an individual, that currently comes to $51,520 a year. But in the partisan donnybrook surrounding the bill’s passage, little attention was paid to the fact that the benefits cut off at the margin rather than sloping down. Policy wonks consider such “subsidy cliffs” risky: they can incentivise people to earn less in order to safeguard their benefits. Eleven years later, Democrats have a chance to fix the problem. A covid-19 relief bill which the House aims to vote on this week would increase the ACA’s subsidies and extend them to anyone who would otherwise have to spend more than 8.5% of their income to buy a benchmark plan. Smoothing out the cliff this way, says the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a health think-tank, could help about 8m people. The cliff is tallest for people aged 55-64, who face high premiums but are too young for Medica...
The Economist     Feb 25, 2021

Donald Trump thrived by painting Democrats as soft on immigration

social issue

MANY IMMIGRATION activists would have cheered President Joe Biden had he merely spent his first month in office signing nine executive actions that reverse some of Donald Trump’s most hostile orders on migration. Mr Biden has told officials they may no longer take children from the arms of asylum-seeking parents. A task-force has been told to find the still-missing parents of 600 such detained children. Rules on deportation are to be milder than before. Refugee resettlement is to expand anew. And those seeking sanctuary at the southern border will be treated more humanely: a few vulnerable ones may again plead from inside America, rather than wait in unsafe camps in Mexico. To the surprise of even some close observers of immigration policy, however, Mr Biden has signalled he wants to go further, quickly. Last month he proposed a comprehensive immigration bill: last week the US Citizenship Act was sent to Congress. If enacted (which is unlikely) it would amount to the biggest shake-up of the migration system in decades . It sets out how an estimated 11m undocumented migrants could win settled, legal status. It would put more resources into immigration courts, encourage inflows of sk...
The Economist     Feb 25, 2021

Now America has passed 500,000 deaths, what next?

social issue

IN A SENSE 500,000 is just a very big number. It is not even accurate, given that perhaps 100,000 American deaths from covid-19 were never counted. And yet every one of them was someone: grandpas and great aunts, old friends and new, neighbours and workmates. Many of them died alone. Grief was President Joe Biden’s theme at the White House on February 22nd, as he remembered 500,071 Americans lost to the pandemic. Warning his compatriots against seeing “each life as a statistic or a blur”, he said that there was “nothing ordinary about them”. At five o’clockthe Stars and Stripes was lowered to half-mast for five days while 500 votive candles flickered on the steps of the South Portico. In just over a year the pandemic has killed Americans on the scale of a world war or a decades-long catastrophe, like the opioid crisis (see chart). In absolute terms no country begins to compare—Brazil, which comes next, has yet to log its 250,000th death. In relative terms America has recorded 151 deaths per 100,000, fewer than Belgium, Britain, Italy and Portugal, but among the most severe.
The Economist     Feb 25, 2021

Covid-19 has boosted the campaign against exams in American schools

education

TO THE DELIGHT of campaigners and some parents, covid-19 has put a wrench in school exams. With support from the Trump administration, all 50 states cancelled accountability testing last March, freeing 51m public-school pupils from the annual rigmarole. The SATs optional essay-writing section and separate subject tests were discontinued this year. The Programme for International Student Assessment, an exam measuring the academic performance of OECD member countries, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a nationwide exam administered to a sample of American pupils, have been postponed too. With opposition building for years against standardised testing in public schools, could this be the end? On February 22nd the Biden administration said exams had to take place, but that the results would not be used to grade schools. Ordinarily the federal government obliges states to hold schools accountable for their pupils’ test scores. Schools with poor results may see their budgets reduced, as part of that exchange of exam results for dollars. Some states and districts have used results to close schools and fire teachers. Teachers in tough places often think this is un...
The Economist     Feb 25, 2021

Teach first

education

THIS WAS a big week for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). The elected board that runs Maryland’s biggest school district held its first in-person meeting since it closed its 208 schools more than 11 months ago. No one should accuse its eight members (a couple of whom attended remotely) of taking covid-19 lightly. Montgomery County, where your columnist’s three offspring attend (loosely speaking) public school, is on track to be the last of America’s 14,000 districts to return pupils to the classroom. Provided the board does not put the brakes on its latest back-to-school plan, as it has three times previously, Lexington’s two sons in elementary school will be back in school—for as little as four days a fortnight—by the beginning of April. His 12-year-old will go back on the same part-time basis three weeks later, by which time he will not have seen a teacher in the flesh for almost 14 months. A comparison with their British cousins, who have missed half as much school despite enduring a second lockdown, shows how extreme this is. Most European countries fully reopened their schools in September. Only a handful of American states, including Florida and Texas, were even close...
The Economist     Feb 25, 2021

Weapons of mass obstruction: protest symbols, from rubber ducks to pussyhats

unrest, conflicts and war

How does a group of people signal its displeasure? With whatever it has to hand. Sometimes, with the hand itself. The precise method is less important than the numbers. If a crowd can raise a salute or a wooden spoon or a plastic toy, this tells the authorities that other forms of resistance are also possible. Anything, it seems, can be freighted with rebellion: in 2014 police in Bangkok began arresting demonstrators who turned public sandwich-eating into an anti-authoritarian gesture (when protests were banned, pro-democracy activists took to holding sedate picnics instead).
The Economist     Feb 24, 2021

The barber cutting through vaccine scepticism

Covid-19 has left its mark on the Shop Spa barbers. Anti-bacterial wipes and paper towels have joined the bottles of unguents cluttering work stations. The chairs and sofa where customers normally wait have been stacked up and taped off, in accordance with coronavirus regulations. Barbers wear face masks, except when they’re ribbing each other – then they pull them down over their chins. The pandemic is serious business, sure. But sometimes you have to be able to joke around.
The Economist     Feb 22, 2021