職場環境悪化
どんどん悪化する職場状況。昼休みが削られ、帰宅時間が遅くなった。それも、何回もである。結局、以前と比べて、昼休みは、半分になり、帰宅時間は一時間十五分遅くなった。二時間の労働強化である。以前が楽すぎたかもしれない。
さらに、職場のインターネットが、管理されるようになった。すべての履歴が職員ごとに記録されるようになり、好ましくないＨＰのときは、警告メッセージが出る。
そういうわけで、職場でブログを書くのは、やめたほうがよさそうだ。
森のくまさん；economist記事から引用
森のくまさんの写真かわいいが、でも実物はきっと恐ろしいのだろう。森のくまさんというタイトルでも、Economist記事であるから、童話ではない。経済でベアは、弱気の意味だ。
The markets and the world economy
Bears in the woods
From The Economist print edition
Despite the rattled markets, the world economy is still relatively strong. Just don't bet your house on it
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IF YOU meet a bear in the woods, try not to panic or scream; on no account should you turn your back and run. As markets around the world have turned grizzly over the past two weeks, some investors seem to have forgotten the old hikers' maxim. After three years of big gains, many stockmarkets have tumbled by 10% or more in less than ten days. The loudest growls have echoed around emerging markets and commodities. Europe has surrendered most of this year's gains. Americans have so far escaped lightly, but they would be unwise to take comfort. Their housing market, the recent rock of their economy, is where a much grizzlier creature lies in wait.
Most investors tend to look first at equity markets—and they have certainly had a good run virtually everywhere. Yet a repeat of the slump after the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2001-02 remains highly unlikely. In 2000 shares were wildly overvalued. Today price/earnings ratios in most stockmarkets are near, if not below, their long-term averages. This suggests that the slide in shares could be short-lived.
So what has caused this burst of volatility? One popular explanation conjures up fears of rising inflation and hence higher interest rates (see article ). Yet this sits oddly with the fall in bond yields and the gold price over the past week: if inflation were the culprit, you would expect both to have risen. The real puzzle is not why volatility has suddenly increased, but why it had been so low in the past year or so. The answer seems to be an abundance of cheap money, which lured investors into complacency. Now they are starting to demand higher returns on riskier assets. Emerging-market equities and metals, not (generally safer) bonds, suffered the biggest mauling in the past week. It could be a healthy correction.
Indeed, the recent jitters need not harm the world economy, which even bears admit has performed stunningly. World GDP has grown at an annualised rate of more than 4% for 11 consecutive quarters (see our economic and financial indicators ). This is the strongest upturn for more than 30 years. Yet global inflation remains historically low. Strong growth with mild inflation is all the more amazing given the tripling of oil prices since 2003. Past oil-price shocks have caused stagflation.
The world has so far shrugged off higher oil prices with the help of two powerful economic forces. The first is the opening up and integration into the world economy of China, India and other emerging economies. This has given the biggest boost to global supply since the industrial revolution. Their cheap labour has cut the cost of goods. The threat that jobs in rich economies could move offshore has helped hold down wages. Although demand from emerging economies has fuelled the surge in oil and commodity prices, the newcomers' overall effect has been to curb inflation in the rich world.
That, in turn, has magnified the second stimulus. Since the bursting of the dotcom bubble, central banks have pumped out cheap money. In 2003 average short-term interest rates in the G7 economies fell to their lowest in recorded history. Because inflation remained low, the central banks have been slow to mop up the excess liquidity. Cheap money has encouraged households, especially American ones, to borrow and spend lavishly. It is not just house prices that have surged ahead; cheap money has encouraged investors across the world to take bigger risks, creating several smaller bubbles. Together the huge boost to supply (from emerging economies) and the huge boost to demand (from easy money) have offset the burden of higher oil prices, creating the once-impossible combination of robust growth and modest inflation.
The era of cheap money is nearing an end. For the first time in 15 years, the three big central banks are now all tightening monetary policy. The European Central Bank has already followed the Federal Reserve's lead in raising interest rates; the Bank of Japan has stopped printing lots of money and will start lifting rates soon. Only now are the markets realising that interest rates may rise by more than they had expected. In the long term, rates should be roughly equal to nominal GDP growth, but in America and elsewhere they are still well below it. Optimists argue that America's economy is coping well with rising interest rates, but it hasn't really sniffed tight money yet. Without easy credit, dear oil will cause more pain.
Until recently, financial markets appeared to be betting that the Goldilocks economy—neither too hot, nor too cold—was safe from the bears. The rattled markets are a reminder that sooner or later growth will slow or inflation will rise. Inflation is not about to spiral upwards but with diminishing spare capacity, it could edge up. America has an extra risk because Wall Street suspects that Ben Bernanke, the Fed's new chairman, may be a soft touch on inflation. If that suspicion persists, he will need to raise interest rates by more than otherwise—or investors will do the tightening for him by pushing up bond yields. That would make other assets look expensive.
It is in the American housing market that the bear may growl loudest. By borrowing against the surging prices of their homes, American consumers have been able to keep on spending. The housing market is already coming off the boil (see article ). If prices merely flatten, the economy could slow sharply as consumer spending and construction are squeezed. If house prices fall as a result of higher bond yields, the American economy could even dip into recession. Less spending and more saving is just what America needs to reduce its current-account deficit, but for American households used to years of plenty it will hurt.
For the world, it is best that America slows today. Later, imbalances will loom even larger. A few years ago, Japan and the euro-area economies were flat on their backs. Now they are growing “above trend”, so the world depends less on America than it once did. The boost to the world economy from China and India will last into the future, even allowing for mishaps. Wise investors should resist the urge to flee, reduce their holdings of risky assets and stare down the bear.
銀行：economistサーベイ無料部分引用
From The Economist print edition
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Banks the world over are scrambling to become larger, whether by organic growth or by mergers and acquisitions, says Robert Cottrell. But how much does size matter?
BORROWING and lending has become a fairly well-understood line of business, and a fairly well-managed one most of the time in most of the world. It is the banks themselves that are volatile, shifting shapes and strategies as furiously as their regulators will allow them in their efforts to win markets and market share. In China they are escaping state captivity by selling shares to foreigners and stockmarket investors. In Russia they are running wild, with balance sheets growing by 30-40% a year. In Japan three new “megabanks” have eaten 11 old banks and are now digesting them. In central Europe foreigners have bought or built 80% of the top local banks since the fall of communism.
In America the ten biggest commercial banks control 49% of the country's banking assets, up from 29% a decade ago. They are pausing for breath now, after a long merger binge encouraged by the deregulation of interstate banking and the removal of barriers between banks, insurance companies and securities firms. Non-financial companies are not meant to own banks, but even that is now being tested by America's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, which wants a restricted banking licence.
This survey of commercial banking around the world is much preoccupied by questions of size and of ownership. Almost everywhere, big banks have been getting bigger through mergers and acquisitions as well as through organic growth. Is there a natural limit to this process of bank-eat-bank? Could the biggest bank of tomorrow be two or three or even ten times the size of a Citibank or an HSBC today, and if not, why not? And who benefits? It is not always the surviving bank's shareholders. One-half of recent bank mergers around the world have destroyed shareholder value, says Philippe De Backer, a partner in Bain & Co, a consulting firm. In America it is medium-sized banks that are prized most highly by the stockmarkets, partly because investors expect them to be bought dearly by the big banks.
One argument commonly used in favour of mergers, in banking as in many other industries, is the pursuit of economies of scale in areas such as procurement, systems, operations, research and marketing. But the gains from that in the mass production of financial services, though not necessarily illusory, can be elusive. There is a sizeable literature of academic papers claiming that economies of scale can be exhausted by the time a bank reaches a relatively modest size. A study of European banks in the 1990s, published by the European Investment Bank, put the figure for savings banks as low as €600m ($760m) in assets. More recent studies suggest far higher thresholds, up to $25 billion.
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Big banks might even dispute that there is a limit at all. But at some point diseconomies of scale will also start creeping in. Management will find it harder and harder to aggregate and summarise everything that is going on in the bank, opening the way to the duplication of expense, the neglect of concealed risks and the failure of internal controls. Something of that last problem afflicted the world's biggest bank holding company, Citigroup, in 2002-05, when it was rocked by a string of compliance problems. America's Federal Reserve reacted by telling Citigroup to suspend large acquisitions, but lifted the order in April this year when it judged that the company had got better controls in place.
Another argument commonly made for mergers is based on economies of scope, the proposition that related lines of business under the same ownership or management can share resources and create opportunities for one another. The basic economy of scope common to almost all banks is the taking of deposits on one hand and the making of loans on the other. The bank gets to re-use its depositors' money profitably. The skills and information useful on one side of the business tend to be useful on the other side too.
But does the same hold good when a retail bank is paired with, say, a corporate bank, an investment-banking division, a credit-card processor, an asset-management operation, private banking (for rich people), an insurance business or a foreign branch network? These businesses all overlap with one another to some degree, but so do lots of other businesses. The fashion for industrial conglomerates came and went 30 years ago. Will financial conglomerates be any more enduring? The bank holding companies that are building them clearly believe so.
A third reason for banks to pursue growth through mergers and acquisitions is one that is never used as an argument at the time, but is universally recognised as a factor. It is managerial ambition (which includes managerial error). Chief executives want the gratification of running a bigger company, or they fear that their own company will be taken over unless they grab another one first.
Managers can argue that the business environment is changing rapidly and that banks must seize the new market opportunities created by new technology or national deregulation or economic globalisation. Thus there is much talk in Europe now of a fresh wave of cross-border mergers and acquisitions within the 25 countries of the European Union, encouraged by the single European currency, the deepening Single European Market and the enlargement of the EU into central and eastern Europe. Shareholders may be the more easily persuaded because a takeover tends to look good at the time. The buyer books the new revenues immediately and cuts some overlapping costs. The acquisition premium goes straight to goodwill. It is only later that you find out whether the businesses are a good long-term fit.
And perhaps growth-hungry CEOs are wiser than their students and their critics know. The very big banks created in America over the past ten years have not been stellar stockmarket performers recently, but they may just be taking time to bed down and knit their management and computer systems more closely together. Their future results may transform the current wisdom about economies of scale.
Bigness may also have benefits not easily captured in studies of financial performance. One is the ability to place strategic bets on future markets, such as China, without putting the whole bank at risk. Another is regulatory capture, or the ability of the regulatee to influence the regulator. The bigger the bank, the more likely its home-country regulators and legislators will be to take its interests into account when drafting new rules, and the more likely they will be to judge it “too big to fail” in the event of a crisis.
Not, of course, that banks these days fold as often as they used to, which is another reason why strong banks go shopping. Weak banks no longer fall into their laps, at least in Europe and America. Banks fail less often, partly because external conditions have been kinder. Developed economies around the world have become more stable over the past 20-30 years, save for Japan in the 1990s. Big shocks in the financial markets have become rarer and better managed. Recent medium-sized shocks, such as the downgrading of General Motors' credit rating last year, have been relatively easily absorbed. The financial markets have moved, you might say, from being a source of shocks to being shock absorbers too.
Such stability may engender its own instability if it encourages everyone to take on more risk in the belief that disasters are less likely to happen. But give credit, until then, where credit is due. Benign economic conditions have encouraged stable banks, and vice versa. Bankers and regulators in much of the world have arrived together at a pretty good model of how commercial banks ought to be run. Pressured by the demands of the capital markets for efficiency and predictability, they have also been pretty good about sticking to the rules and so avoiding catastrophic mistakes.
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A version of that modern banking model is enshrined in a new set of rules, running to about 700 pages, that tell banks how they should weigh their risks, and how much capital they should keep on hand in case things go wrong. Big banks in most developed banking markets will be adopting the new rules, known as Basel 2, starting with the European Union next year. But America is hesitating. Some critics there think that the Basel 2 rules are at once too lax and too complicated; others think they discriminate too much between big and small banks.
One safe prediction is that Basel 2 and its risk-modelling methods will make banks even harder to understand than they are already. Ask a banker to explain risk management or credit derivatives or capital allocation to you, and the algebra will soon be spilling off the blackboard. The opacity of banks may count against them with investors. Mercer Oliver Wyman, a strategic and risk-management consultancy, says that publicly listed financial-services companies around the world were valued last year at an average of 14 times their profits, against a multiple of 18 for non-financial companies. But the discount has been shrinking, suggesting both that investors have got more optimistic about relative growth prospects for financial services, and that they think bankers have got better at banking, turning it into a generally less risky business.
This survey broadly agrees on both points. It considers the state of competition and consolidation in the developed markets of America, Europe and Japan. It looks at the big emerging markets of China, India and Russia, where the global winners and losers of the future may be decided. (China alone may account for over 25% of new global demand for financial services in the coming five years, says Alain LeCouedic, a partner at Boston Consulting Group.) It pauses to consider the intricacies of Basel 2, the virtues of pure investment banks and the cost of a Brazilian overdraft before drawing a conclusion which can be briefly summarised here: better banks tend to get bigger, but bigger banks are not necessarily better.
タイムワーナーとAOL
From :-) to :-(
From The Economist print edition
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Once the darling of the internet, AOL is struggling to remain relevant
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FEW people at Time Warner, the biggest media company in the world, have anything nice to say about AOL, its internet division. Executives who had shares in Time Warner at the time of its merger with AOL in 2000 find it hard to forget how their savings were wiped out in the aftermath—the company's share price fell by 75%—and how arrogant the AOL people used to be. Five years on from the merger, AOL is still the sick man among Time Warner's television, film and publishing businesses, and it is as unloved as ever.
Time Warner may soon have to decide whether to push the patient out of the door. It is certainly under no illusions about AOL's prospects, nor is it particularly attached to the business. The firm is already looking into a possible sale of parts of AOL Europe. “For the moment, the doctor says more tests are needed,” says Larry Haverty, a fund manager at Gabelli Global Multimedia Trust. By the autumn, he argues, it will be clearer whether Time Warner should sell AOL.
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In the 1990s, during the early days of the internet, AOL flourished by sitting at the juncture of three online businesses: advertising, access (as an online-service provider with monthly subscribers) and e-commerce (through its affiliated merchants). But today's internet users have no need to pay AOL extra for its services, because they can go direct to other companies. And AOL failed to recognise early enough that people would move to broadband-internet access, which they can buy straight from the firms that own the network, whether a telephone company or a cable firm. Every year AOL loses a few million of the more than 20m people in America and Europe who pay it for dial-up internet access (see chart). In the first quarter its revenues dropped by 7% to $2 billion and its operating profits shrunk by 17%, to $442m, dragging down its parent's results.
AOL's response is to try to increase its revenues from internet advertising. To attract traffic, last year it flung open the doors to its collection of online “content” to every surfer; until then much of it had been available only to subscribers. Most analysts think this strategy is a good one. But investors are impatient to see gains from the advertising business offset the decline of the access side. That may never happen—and if it does, it could take many years. AOL's poor performance is particularly sensitive at the moment because Time Warner's chief executive, Richard Parsons, recently saw off an attack from Carl Icahn, an activist investor. The conglomerate's share price (Mr Icahn's chief complaint) has not gone up since then, and analysts on Wall Street cite AOL as the main reason why they do not advise their clients to buy Time Warner's shares.
One of AOL's biggest problems, competitors say, is recruiting the best people in the technology industry and keeping them. Being based in Dulles, Virginia, away from the technology industry's centres, is hardly a draw. Moreover, AOL offers employees less chance to become rich through share options or an initial public offering than other internet firms that are growing. In contrast to its big rivals, which are hiring, AOL laid off 7% of its workforce this month. Several senior managers are rumoured soon to be leaving.
When he was fighting off Mr Icahn, Mr Parsons called AOL the “internet superspice” of Time Warner. This positive view was bolstered last year when Google took a 5% stake in the business for $1 billion, although the internet giant was motivated less by AOL's attractions than by a desire to stop it allying with Microsoft, an arch-rival. AOL has had some notable successes in its new advertising strategy: last year, for instance, millions of people watched the Live 8 music concert on
AOL.com
, and AOL made a profit from the event by selling ads around it.
However, AOL's fortunes in advertising are worryingly dependent on its declining access business. AOL estimates that just over half of its unique monthly visitors are subscribers, rather than surfers with no other connection to the firm. So as subscribers leave, AOL will steadily lose page views. Moreover, each subscriber generates about six times as many page views as non-subscribers, says Henry Blodget, president of Cherry Hill Research, because subscriptions represent households rather than individuals, and because AOL members are heavy internet users. AOL has to swim against a strong tide to keep its position in internet advertising.
Better news is that the company is at least managing to maintain its page views, despite losing subscribers. But its rivals in internet advertising are rapidly increasing their page views and AOL will need to add page views if it is to grow in future. As for its total sales of advertising, which increased by 26% in the first quarter to $392m (or a fifth of total revenues), Mr Haverty says that the performance was acceptable, but unexciting compared with Yahoo!, which increased its advertising revenues by 35% from a much bigger base.
During recent years of innovation on the internet, as Google has risen to prominence and other popular new services such as Craigslist, MySpace and iTunes have taken wing, AOL has been distracted by its troubled relations with Time Warner—it was only last year that Steve Case, AOL's controversial co-founder, finally left the conglomerate's board. “AOL largely sat on the sidelines as the internet evolved over the past six years,” says Kevin Werbach of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Now, however, AOL is at last busy launching new services. This week it started a VOIP phone service based on its popular instant-messaging system, and earlier in May it launched a new social-networking service called AIM Pages. AOL has lots of experience in social networking, says Mr Werbach, and it has a good chance of succeeding even against well established competitors such as MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Although AOL is having some success in attracting people to its content, the unit is not making good enough use of its parent's wide array of brands. People in Time Warner's other divisions complain that AOL develops new sites on its own and ignores them: AOL Sports, for instance, makes no use of the powerful Sports Illustrated brand, and its new celebrity site,
TMZ.com
, does not use material from Time Inc's People magazine and websites. Time Warner's divisions are mostly developing digital strategies independently of AOL.
For the moment, Time Warner's plan is to do as much as it can to encourage AOL's renewal. “In order to move AOL to an advertising business more rapidly,” says Jeff Bewkes, the firm's chief operating officer, “we may ourselves take actions so that AOL will rely less on subscriber volume or subscriber payments.” In other words, let paying users leave, as long as new traffic comes—a risky strategy, since so much traffic comes from the subscribers. In the end, the interdependence of the access and the advertising sides of AOL may lead Time Warner to sell the whole business—and put its painful past finally behind it.
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生化学兵器の攻撃：Economist
Telling the truth to the terrified
From The Economist print edition
Knowing that anxiety causes the same symptoms as poisoning could help in a biochemical attack
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LAST December a mysterious illness broke out in a school in the Shelkovsk region of Chechnya. Symptoms included convulsions, nausea and breathing difficulties. The illness spread to neighbouring schools. Local doctors suspected mass poisoning, but when a delegation of medics arrived from Moscow, they attributed it to mass hysteria.
Chechnya has been the scene of Russian military operations since 1994, so understandably those affected have little faith in the official verdict. Meanwhile, without knowing the nature of the suspected toxin, local doctors are at a loss as to how to treat their patients. The only way to break the impasse, public health experts say, is to send in an investigating team from outside the former Soviet block—one that the Chechens will trust. If mass hysteria is to blame, they say, the truth is the best medicine.
Zsuzsanna Jakab is director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm but, in 1996, she worked for the World Health Organisation and helped to investigate an outbreak of illness in Macedonia. It affected schoolchildren in the mainly Albanian district of Tetovo. Dr Jakab received reports from Albanian representatives of mass poisoning, which were denied by the Macedonian authorities. She led a team consisting of a paediatrician, an epidemiologist, a toxicologist and a clinical expert. They spent a couple of weeks in the region, taking samples that were sent to laboratories outside the country for analysis, reviewing the hospital's case reports, interviewing affected families and searching for possible environmental contaminants.
The team found no evidence of poisoning, and concluded that the illness was probably caused by stress resulting from high political tensions in Tetovo. Its report was rejected both by the Albanians, who continued to stick to the poisoning theory, and by the Macedonians, who denied that a climate of fear existed in the region. Nevertheless, after the team returned to explain its findings to the families, reports of symptoms gradually subsided. Dr Jakab says that a region where conspiracy theories and fear abound is a prime breeding ground for mass hysteria. In a war zone, allegations that a toxic agent has been deployed cannot be dismissed—indeed they need more urgent investigation, she says.
Mass hysteria, or medically unexplained epidemic illness, has been documented since medieval times. Simon Wessely, a director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London, says such outbreaks tend to reflect a society's beliefs. In the past witchcraft or demonic possession were often blamed—they still are in some societies. In today's industrialised world, environmental contamination is more likely to be invoked. In 2001, after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, Dr Wessely predicted more of these outbreaks, because of the heightened risk of terrorism and, in particular, bioterrorism. The later anthrax attack, which killed five people, was second only to the assault on the twin towers in terms of the shock and anxiety it caused the American people.
Dr Wessely distinguishes acute episodes of mass hysteria from the chronic sort. He says that he has a huge boxful of reports of the first type, which often occur among schoolchildren and are investigated rapidly. Symptoms vanish within days, once the patients have been gently reassured that their imagined cause does not exist. When an outbreak occurs against a backdrop of social trauma, it can go on for months or longer. For an episode to become chronic, patients' beliefs that they are being poisoned must be reinforced by local physicians and media. Shelkovsk may be a case in point, he says.
Whether or not the Chechen incident turns out to be mass hysteria, the patients' symptoms are real enough. What people find hard to believe, says Dr Jakab, is that anxiety-related illness can so closely mimic illness caused by an organic cause. In 1987 thieves stole a canister containing highly radioactive caesium chloride that would have been used in radiation therapy from an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil. They sold it to a junkyard owner, exposing a number of people to high doses of radiation. Some 112,000 people were screened, and 250 of them were found to have been contaminated. Yet another 5,000 people reported vomiting, diarrhoea and rashes—all symptoms of acute radiation sickness.
Dr Jakab says medical staff need to realise that the cause of these symptoms is anxiety so that patients can be treated accordingly. The World Health Organisation now has instructions describing what to do. Being told to stop faking it is unlikely to speed patients along the road to recovery. Instead, they should be removed from the stressful environment and persuaded that nothing is poisoning them except their own worries. People also need to be educated about the real risks of bioterrorism, says Dr Wessely. Ignorance breeds fear. The danger is that medical and social services will be overwhelmed, as they were in Brazil, and so take longer to identify the real victims of the incident. That, he says, is why biochemical warfare is really psychological warfare.
経済成長理論の成長：Economist記事引用
The growth of growth theory
From The Economist print edition
The riddle of technology and prosperity is explored in a fine new book
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FIFTY years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebrated and seasoned, he was thus a natural choice to serve on an independent “commission on growth” announced last month by the World Bank. (The commission will weigh and sift what is known about growth, and what might be done to boost it.) Natural, that is, except for anyone who takes his 1956 contribution literally. For, according to the model he laid out in that article, the efforts of policymakers to raise the rate of growth per head are ultimately futile.
A government eager to force the pace of economic advance may be tempted by savings drives, tax cuts, investment subsidies or even population controls. As a result of these measures, each member of the labour force may enjoy more capital to work with. But this process of “capital-deepening”, as economists call it, eventually runs into diminishing returns. Giving a worker a second computer does not double his output.
Accumulation alone cannot yield lasting progress, Mr Solow showed. What can? Anything that allows the economy to add to its output without necessarily adding more labour and capital. Mr Solow labelled this font of wealth “technological progress” in 1956, and measured its importance in 1957. But in neither paper did he explain where it came from or how it could be accelerated. Invention, innovation and ingenuity were all “exogenous” influences, lying outside the remit of his theory. To practical men of action, Mr Solow's model was thus an impossible tease: what it illuminated did not ultimately matter; and what really mattered, it did little to illuminate.
The law of diminishing returns holds great sway over the economic imagination. But its writ has not gone unchallenged. A fascinating new book, “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations” by David Warsh, tells the story of the rebel economics of increasing returns. A veteran observer of dismal scientists at work, first at the Boston Globe and now in an online column called Economic Principals , Mr Warsh has written the best book of its kind since Peter Bernstein's “Capital Ideas”.
Diminishing returns ensure that firms cannot grow too big, preserving competition between them. This, in turn, allows the invisible hand of the market to perform its magic. But, as Mr Warsh makes clear, the fealty economists show to this principle is as much mathematical as philosophical. The topology of diminishing returns is easy for economists to navigate: a landscape of declining gradients and single peaks, free of the treacherous craters and crevasses that might otherwise entrap them.
The hero of the second half of Mr Warsh's book is Paul Romer, of Stanford University, who took up the challenge ducked by Mr Solow. If technological progress dictates economic growth, what kind of economics governs technological advance? In a series of papers, culminating in an article in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, Mr Romer tried to make technology “endogenous”, to explain it within the terms of his model. In doing so, he steered growth theory out of the comfortable cul-de-sac in which Mr Solow had so neatly parked it.
The escape required a three-point turn. First, Mr Romer assumed that ideas were goods—of a particular kind. Ideas, unlike things, are “non-rival”: everyone can make use of a single design, recipe or blueprint at the same time. This turn in the argument led to a second: the fabrication of ideas enjoys increasing returns to scale. Expensive to produce, they are cheap, almost costless, to reproduce. Thus the total cost of a design does not change much, whether it is used by one person or by a million.
Blessed with increasing returns, the manufacture of ideas might seem like a good business to go into. Actually, the opposite is true. If the business is free to enter, it is not worth doing so, because competition pares the price of a design down to the negligible cost of reproducing it. Unless idea factories can enjoy some measure of monopoly over their designs—by patenting them, copyrighting them, or just keeping them secret—they will not be able to cover the fixed cost of inventing them. That was the final turn in Mr Romer's new theory of growth.
How much guidance do these theories offer to policymakers, such as those sitting on the World Bank's commission? In Mr Solow's model, according to a common caricature, technology falls like “manna from heaven”, leaving the bank's commissioners with little to do but pray. Mr Romer's theory, by contrast, calls for a more worldly response: educate people, subsidise their research, import ideas from abroad, carefully gauge the protection offered to intellectual property.
But did policymakers need Mr Romer's model to reveal the importance of such things? Mr Solow has expressed doubts. Despite the caricature, he did not intend in his 1956 model to deny that innovation is often dearly bought and profit-driven. The question is whether anything useful can be said about that process at the level of the economy as a whole. That question has yet to be answered definitively. In particular, Mr Solow worries that some of the “more powerful conclusions” of the new growth theory are “unearned”, flowing as they do from powerful assumptions.
At one point in Mr Warsh's book, Mr Romer is quoted comparing the building of economic models to writing poetry. It is a triumph of form as much as content. This creative economist did not discover anything new about the world with his 1990 paper on growth. Rather, he extended the metre and rhyme-scheme of economics to capture a world—the knowledge economy—expressed until then only in the loosest kind of doggerel. That is how economics makes progress. Sadly, it does not, in and of itself, help economies make progress.
イスラエル市民は誰か：Economist記事引用
Who's a citizen?
From The Economist print edition
A decision by Israel's Supreme Court has reignited the Jewish state's debate about how it should keep itself Jewish
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WHICH basic human rights may a country override to keep itself safe? And to keep its demographic status quo? Such questions have been tormenting America and Europe recently. This week they reared their head, not for the first time, in Israel.
By six votes to five, the Supreme Court rejected petitions from two human-rights groups asking it to overturn the “Citizenship and Entry into Israel” law. Passed in 2003 as a temporary, emergency measure after Israel had suffered its worst-ever spate of suicide bombings, the law specifically bans residents of the West Bank and Gaza who marry Israelis from getting Israeli citizenship, residency or even entry permits. An amendment last year let Palestinians above a certain age apply for visiting permits, but left the security services with sweeping powers of refusal. Even in apartheid South Africa, says Adalah, a legal-advocacy centre that was one of the petitioners, a court once overturned a similar law as unconstitutional.
The law mostly affects Palestinian Israelis living in the towns bordering the West Bank, who have often married Palestinians from across the Green Line that marked Israel's border until the war of 1967. Yoav Loeff of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the other petitioner, says nobody knows how many couples the law keeps apart. Nor are there reliable statistics on how many Palestinians requested or got citizenship before the law was passed. “It was a policy made on the basis of a total lack of data”, he explains. But judging from the calls to the association, the law has affected at least hundreds of families, if not thousands. Meanwhile, just 26 Palestinians who immigrated through marriage have been questioned on suspicion of aiding terrorists, though none has been convicted. Yet the state argued that this justified a broad ban. That is what divided the judges.
However, the ruling is less clear-cut than it seems. In Israel a law can be overturned if it violates the Basic Laws, Israel's underpowered version of a constitution, and is also “disproportionate”: ie, if the harm it does to some outweighs the benefits to others. Nine of the 11 judges found the citizenship law unconstitutional and six deemed it disproportionate—a moral victory, in other words, for the activists. But only five thought the remedy was to throw out the law. The others decided, since the law is up for renewal soon anyway, to let parliament pass a better one.
The strong vote against the law's constitutionality means that parliament may well do just that. For besides keeping out terrorists in the short term, the Jewish state wants to keep itself Jewish in the long term. Immigrating to Israel has always depended on who you are: Jews get automatic citizenship, while non-Jews, like immigrants anywhere else, have to meet certain criteria. But in recent years aliyah (Jewish immigration) has slowed; non-Jews are a growing slice of the population—especially Arab Israelis, who make up nearly a fifth of Israel's 7m citizens and have a higher-than-average birthrate.
Some politicians now want an immigration policy to counter that trend. Haim Ramon, the justice minister, said this week that he will replace the citizenship law with one “that will apply to everyone”. A government-appointed commission issued a draft set of proposals in February.
Its chairman, Amnon Rubinstein, who also backed the citizenship law, cites lots of international precedents for banning citizens of an enemy country in wartime. With Hamas, which now runs the Palestinian Authority, refusing to recognise Israel, many Jewish Israelis would apply that label to Palestinians. Less aggressive options would be to limit citizenship using economic criteria, age or other requirements that are colour-blind in theory but could be designed in practice to discriminate against Palestinians and any other nationalities that Israel does not want.
Critics of Israel argue that its obsession with its ethnic balance is more appropriate to the 19th century, when European ethnic-nationalist movements first inspired the idea of a Jewish nation-state, than to the modern world. Supporters retort that other countries where the ethnic majority is in peril are doing much the same thing. In Denmark, for instance, after high immigration and poor integration prompted 12% of Danes to vote for an anti-immigrant party in 2001, the government put curbs on immigration through marriage, including minimum ages and longer waiting periods for citizenship, and restricted welfare benefits for the first seven years. Israel's policy could end up looking similar—and very hard to assail in court
アメリカの銀行ブームに陰り？：Economist記事引用
Time to lose weight?
From The Economist print edition
Bankers may have to concentrate on the bank they already have—not the one they want to buy
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THIS decade has been the best in living memory for America's commercial banks—so far. As our survey this week points out, banks have been growing fast around the world, from Tokyo to Moscow. But nowhere does the industry seem more triumphant than in the United States. Last year American banks declared a fifth straight year of record earnings. Their return on equity has been at a 60-year high. No bank has failed for almost two years, an all-time record.
Normally, this is exactly the time in the boom-bust cycle of banking to start worrying about credit quality and over-lending. It is certainly true that external conditions have been unusually benign. Inflation and interest rates have been low, economic growth strong, and financial markets buoyant. This week's wobbles may presage more volatility ahead: banks may rue the money they have lent to hedge funds, especially when it is secured against illiquid derivatives. And when America's property bubble is finally pricked, there will surely be nasty surprises for its banks there too.
Yet there are some reasons for cautious optimism when it comes to both regulators and bankers. Broadly speaking, the former have got it right. Regulators have opened up the industry, getting rid of interstate banking restrictions in 1994 and breaking down the barriers between banks, brokers and insurance companies in 1999. At the same time, regulators have forced American banks to meet some of the toughest capital requirements in the world. For their part, bankers have got better at banking—which is to say, better at information technology, risk management, retailing and marketing. They lend much less to big companies than they did even five years ago. In retail banking, the source of half their revenues, they cross-sell other financial services to customers. They have seen off internet banks by mastering internet banking themselves; they may well see off the latest contender, Wal-Mart, too.
Yet alongside all this success, there sits a theory which looks increasingly questionable: that bigger is best. Last year the ten top banks controlled 49% of America's total banking assets, up from 29% ten years before. JPMorgan Chase, the country's third-biggest bank by market capitalisation, has been through 20 mergers and acquisitions in the past 15 years.
Like many size-obsessed industrialists of yore, the banks insist that market share and economies of scale are all-important, but their shareholders are more ambivalent. Citigroup, America's biggest bank holding company, has underperformed the stockmarket over the past five years. So has JPMorgan Chase. Another monster bank, Bank of America, has done better but is still valued at less than the sum of its parts. All those mergers take time to bed down. And there is also a worry that the biggest banks are testing the limits of manageability. Size and complexity makes them hard to understand and to control from any one centre.
Last year the Federal Reserve Board told Citigroup to suspend further big acquisitions, when some of its controls had seemed to have gone awry. The Fed rescinded the order last month, satisfied that Citigroup had righted itself. But this shot across the bows was surely well timed. Bigness may be a competitive advantage, but only up to a point, and banks may well find they have passed that point—especially if markets lurch and an asset class or two blows up in their faces
過去を無視する中国：Economist記事から引用
Ignoring the past
From The Economist print edition
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Forty years on, the government still avoids discussion of the Cultural Revolution
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IN THE village of Hongsheng, Li Furong feared trouble when he was summoned one day in August 1966 to a meeting. He had been denounced as a “capitalist-roader” and thought fellow peasants had gathered to attack him. Instead he found himself press-ganged into helping with the murder of octogenarian former landlords in one of the bloodiest orgies of violence in or around China's capital, Beijing, during the Cultural Revolution. Even 40 years later, the authorities are trying to suppress news of what happened in Hongsheng and nearby villages of Beijing's Daxing district.
The Communist Party's unwillingness to confront the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which was launched on May 16th 1966 and officially ended ten years later with the death of Mao Zedong and the fall of the Gang of Four, means that for Chinese historians as well as for millions of victims that entire period is, in effect, off-limits for debate. The passage of time does not appear to be helping. Chinese scholars say the government has been even more intent on stopping public commemoration of this week's anniversary than it was a decade ago. No mention of it has appeared in the state-controlled media. A group of scholars who held a private symposium in Beijing in March to discuss the Cultural Revolution avoided using e-mail to arrange it for fear their communications would be intercepted by officials.
Partly, it is embarrassment about the scale and brutality of the violence carried out in Mao's name. In Hongsheng, Mr Li, now 75, says village officials told the meeting that former landlords and rich peasants, stripped of their holdings after the Communists took power in 1949, planned to stage a revolt. No evidence was offered. The plan was to kill the alleged plotters and their entire families that night. Mr Li, worried that as a “capitalist-roader” he too would be killed, agreed to use his well-known skills with rope to bind the victims. Two former landlords in their 80s were the first to be dealt with. Mr Li had barely finished his work before the old men were dragged away and beaten to death.
It could have been worse. Mr Li says that, had he not asked the village party chief whether he had written authority for this, other members of the landlords' families would have been murdered that night too. In some neighbouring villages there was much greater bloodshed. The youngest victim was one month old. Bodies were thrown down wells or into pits. In the commune to which Hongsheng belonged, 110 people were slaughtered within 24 hours. This was only one of 13 communes in Daxing district involved in what has become known to locals as the “8/31 [August 31st] massacre”. City officials called a halt to the violence after a couple of brave village officials travelled to the party's headquarters in central Beijing, 35 km (22 miles) away, to complain.
Even today, few in Beijing know anything about this, even though the official death toll, 324, exceeds the conservative government estimate of around 200 killed in the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. A brief mention of the massacre appeared in a book on the Cultural Revolution that was published in 1986 and quickly banned. A detailed government account was published only four years ago in an appendix to the “Daxing County Gazette”, a hefty and little-read tome, but was not reported in any newspaper. Of those killed, the book says, 91 were women. Nineteen entire families were eliminated.
The Daxing killings were part of what some perpetrators boasted of as a “red terror” that gripped Beijing between August and October 1966. Wang Youqin of the University of Chicago says officials have never acknowledged the extent of the bloodshed in the capital. She says that Red Guard mobs, obeying Mao's exhortation to “be violent”, killed some 2,000 Beijing residents in the space of two weeks.
One reason for the government's reticence is that, during this stage of the Cultural Revolution, many Red Guard leaders were the offspring of high-ranking officials who were subsequently purged but who became powerful again after Mao's death. Perpetrators of the violence were barred from influential positions after Deng Xiaoping took control in 1978. But Ms Wang says their family connections often protected them from punishment. The “Daxing County Gazette” says 348 people were “directly responsible” for the murders there, nearly two-thirds of them party members. Only 38 were jailed, the longest for 12 years. Pardons were granted to 246.
Officials fear that closer scrutiny of the Cultural Revolution could destabilise the country by inflaming long suppressed antagonisms. Many scholars now believe that well over 1m were killed or driven to suicide in political struggles between 1966 and 1976. The lives of almost all urban residents were profoundly disrupted. Schools and universities were closed. Educated people were forced to leave cities and work on farms. Family members turned on one another. Many of those now in their 50s belong to a “lost generation” whose education and careers were permanently blighted by the Cultural Revolution.
In 1981 the party leadership issued a long denunciation of the Cultural Revolution, as well as various other “mistakes” made by Mao, though these were portrayed as secondary to his contributions. The “Gang of Four” led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who were deemed responsible for the Cultural Revolution's atrocities, were given lengthy prison terms (the last of the four died in December). Most of those persecuted were officially “rehabilitated” by the early 1980s.
There is, however, no official memorial to the victims. Appeals by some intellectuals for a museum dedicated to the events have gone unheeded. In recent months, private funds have started to remedy this. Last year, a privately run Cultural Revolution museum opened near the coastal city of Shantou in southern Guangdong province. In Anren township, near Chengdu, the capital of the south-western province of Sichuan, a wealthy real-estate developer, Fan Jianchuan, says he is preparing to open another later this month.
These ventures are still modest. The one in Shantou shows pictures of officials and other prominent figures being persecuted, but otherwise sticks to the government line. Mr Fan's will concentrate at first on porcelain artefacts from the period. His vast and lavishly designed complex, opened last year, is already home to a remarkable display of historical daring: a whole building of exhibits concerns the (positive) contribution of the Kuomintang, China's then ruling nationalist party, to the war against Japan. In Communist Party histories the Kuomintang is portrayed as having shirked the war.
But Mr Fan has no plans to display objects relating to the Cultural Revolution's factional warfare and other violence. “It's not just that I'm too cowardly and don't want trouble, but I also think it wouldn't be good for the peace of society,” he says. He may perhaps do so in 20 years.
中国の格差
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学校に通えない中国の子どもたち
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