RSA: Populism and the Fate of the West | Bill Emmott

When faced with global instability and economic uncertainty, it is tempting for states to react by closing borders, hoarding wealth and solidifying power, and for citizens to look upon one another with suspicion, incomprehension and mistrust.

But as mainstream technocrats are purged, and populists fall on their own swords, could something better emerge from the rubble? Could we be in the process of watching the birth of a repoliticised and refreshed democracy?

Speakers: Bill Emmott, Former Economist Editor-in-chief; Joris Luyendijk, Investigative Journalist; Edward Luce, US columnist, Financial Times, Chair: Rowan Conway

Nautilus Magazine: If ET Calls, Think Twice About Answering

Scientists are no closer to consensus today, and the question is more urgent than ever. New SETI technologies are greatly expanding the scope of the search; if aliens are out there and are sending radio or light signals, we could hear from them within a decade. We need to decide whether we would respond to an extraterrestrial message. Moreover, the very success of the search may hinge on our willingness to communicate. A number of SETI scientists think the reason we may not have heard from aliens yet is that they’re waiting for us to reach out to them first.

Those who think we should stay mum point out that not even Will Smith could defend Earth from an extraterrestrial foe. Our only real protection, they argue, is to stay hidden. “We have to realize that we know almost nothing about ET,” says John Gertz, a former chair of the SETI Institute board of trustees and a Hollywood producer. “We don’t know how advanced they are, we don’t know what their intentions are—whether they’ll be hostile or friendly or, in my opinion as a businessman, simply want to barter or trade with us. But if their intentions are hostile, their abilities to do us harm can be absolute.” [...]

Scientists who favor Active SETI, or METI—Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence—think it’s too late to hide. We’ve been broadcasting our presence into space since the 1930s. “Any civilization slightly more advanced than we are could pick up I Love Lucy going off into space,” says astronomer Douglas Vakoch, who founded METI International, an organization dedicated to researching active approaches to SETI. If another species wants to annihilate or enslave us, they already have all the information they need. A deliberate communication does not add to our risk, but might win us friends. Vakoch and others read a hopeful lesson into the Great Silence. According to an idea known as the zoo hypothesis, civilizations may be watching us for a sign we want to engage them in conversation.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Hidden Sexism of How We Think About Risk

However, for decades there have been indications that risk taking isn’t a one-dimensional personality trait: Instead, there are “insurance-buying gamblers” and “skydiving wallflowers,” as one group of researchers put it. An early study of more than 500 business executives, for example, looked at their preferences across a variety of risky choices, like business and personal investments, complex financial choice dilemmas, the amount of their own wealth held in risky assets, as well as nonfinancial risks. Clearly, if risk taking were a stable personality trait, then someone who tended to take risks in one area of decision making would also tend to report being a risk taker in the other domains. Yet this simply wasn’t so. Knowing the riskiness of an executive’s personal wealth strategy, for instance, told you nothing about how he’d behave in a business investment context. [...]

The critical point here is that “the risk in a given situation is inherently subjective, varying from one individual to the next.” It’s simply not possible to assess the “objective” characteristics of a risky situation, then infer a person’s appetite for risk from the decision she or he makes. The importance of subjectivity in the perception of risks and benefits for humanity’s colorful diversity of risk taking turns out to be equally crucial for understanding sex differences. Contrary to what many might assume, women and men have similar risk attitudes, Weber and colleagues found. For the same subjectively perceived risk and benefit, they are equally likely to tempt fate. When men and women do diverge in risk-taking propensity, it is because they perceive the risks and benefits differently. So are men inherently constituted to perceive risks more positively, making them more inclined to take them? A closer look at the actual pattern of sex differences in risk taking reveals important nuances that make this unworkable as an explanation. [...]

Indeed, there are already documented exceptions to the notion of risk taking as a masculine trait. A number of studies have found that women are at least as willing as men to take social risks (like admitting that their tastes are different from those of their friends, or disagreeing with their father on a major issue). Women were also found to be more likely than men to report that they would take risks in situations in which there was a small chance of benefit for a small fixed cost (such as trying to sell an already-written screenplay to a Hollywood studio, or calling a radio station running a promotion in which the 12th caller receives money). So why do perceptions of risks and benefits apparently differ between the sexes in some realms but not others? One obvious answer is that some activities—like unprotected sex or excessive drinking—may actually be objectively more risky for females. Risk researchers have also found that both knowledge and familiarity in a particular domain reduces perceptions of risk. Plausibly, men may tend to be relatively more knowledgeable or familiar with some of the risky activities that tend to feature in surveys (like sports betting, financial investments, and motorcycle riding).

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Vox: Helsinki’s bicycle highway and other great innovations to build healthier cities

Snaking through the city core, the Baana — or "fast lane" — is a converted railway track. On foot or bicycle, I could safely and easily access many key points in Helsinki without breathing in exhaust from cars or worrying about getting crushed under a truck. And if I so desired, I could even stop for a basketball or table tennis game at designated outdoor courts along the way.  [...]

Similarly, in June The Lancet medical journal published a landmark report on why the medical community needs to galvanize against climate change, what it called "the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century." One idea here is that changing our built environment doesn't just reduce greenhouse gas emissions — it can also make us healthier. [...]

The way cities are set up can determine whether we feel compelled to use a car or bus to get to work, instead of our legs or a bike. Opting for the latter, the public health argument goes, is hugely beneficial on a variety of fronts. There's good evidence that cities designed to be walkable and bike-friendly carry both health and environmental benefits. Researchers in Barcelona, for example, recently measured the risks and benefits of the city's bike-sharing scheme, Bicing. They found that it got more people cycling, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the city.

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The Economist: Goldenballs

A late-medieval banker from Augsburg in southern Germany, Fugger has never been as celebrated as Cosimo de Medici and his Florentine sons and cousins, whose reputation as bankers was burnished by their excellent taste in Renaissance art. But Fugger was the better banker. Were he alive today, he would have cut a swathe through Wall Street and the City, and yet his remarkable history is still little known. Mr Steinmetz’s prose does not always sparkle and some arcane details of banking history are fuzzy, but the tale of Fugger’s aspiration, ruthlessness and greed is riveting. [...]

He flooded the market with so much metal that the price collapsed and his competitors were gravely weakened. Subsequently, he helped finance a Portuguese scheme to relocate the pepper and spice trade to Lisbon, a move so successful that it delivered a fatal blow to the commercial stature of Venice. He also had a thirst for information about trade and commerce that led him to create a network of couriers whose reports to Augsburg were printed and distributed to clients in the form of a primitive newspaper. Fugger had invented the world’s first news service. [...]

Fugger’s relationship with the Vatican was based on an extensive branch network through which he could transfer offertory collections from Germany to Rome (in return for a 3% commission). But his most astonishing and unexpected historical achievement, says Mr Steinmetz, was unwittingly lighting the fuse that started the Reformation. Fugger teamed up with another Habsburg client, for whom he had bought the archbishopric of Mainz, and the pair began to sell indulgences (a forgiveness of sins, which provided, for a fee, a short cut to heaven), splitting the proceeds with Pope Leo, who used the cash to build St Peter’s Basilica. In 1517 Martin Luther was sufficiently outraged by this scheme that he wrote the “95 Theses” that damned Rome, sparking the Protestant Reformation.

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JSTOR Daily: The Illustrious History of the Avocado

Scientists think that the fruit first originated in Africa, then made it to North America, then traveled down to Central America. Conditions for avocado cultivation may have existed as far back as 16,000 B.C.E., the team writes—and its long history among Caral, Mokaya, and Maya peoples points to its beloved status.

Avocado can be found as the name of the 14th month on the Maya calendar, on Pacal tombs in Chiapas, and in Aztec paintings. Linguistic clues point to avocados’ significance, too. “The presence of a plant or animal in nature alone is not enough for it to be named,” the authors note; “it is necessary for the society or human group to acknowledge the importance of the species before naming it.” [...]

As the Spaniards traveled outward to other colonies, they brought the avocado with them. They’ve been in California since the 1850s and had made their way all over the world by 1998. And though the world is still sorting through its modern avocado supply problem—blame the shortage on weather, labor issues, and increased demand—the ascendance of the humble avocado makes even more sense when you recognize its old-school roots.

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The Economist: Why Israel needs a Palestinian state

Israel’s “temporary” occupation has endured for half a century. The peace process that created “interim” Palestinian autonomy, due to last just five years before a final deal, has dragged on for more than 20. A Palestinian state is long overdue. Rather than resist it, Israel should be the foremost champion of the future Palestine that will be its neighbour. This is not because the intractable conflict is the worst in the Middle East or, as many once thought, the central cause of regional instability: the carnage of the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere disproves such notions. The reason Israel must let the Palestinian people go is to preserve its own democracy. [...]

Nevertheless, the creation of a Palestinian state is the second half of the world’s promise, still unredeemed, to split British-era Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Since the six-day war, Israel has been willing to swap land for peace, notably when it returned Sinai to Egypt in 1982. But the conquests of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were different. They lie at the heart of Israelis’ and Palestinians’ rival histories, and add the intransigence of religion to a nationalist conflict. Early Zionist leaders accepted partition grudgingly; Arab ones tragically rejected it outright. In 1988 the Palestine Liberation Organisation accepted a state on part of the land, but Israeli leaders resisted the idea until 2000. Mr Netanyahu himself spoke of a (limited) Palestinian state only in 2009. [...]

All this makes for a dangerous complacency: that, although the conflict cannot be solved, it can be managed indefinitely. Yet the never-ending subjugation of Palestinians will erode Israel’s standing abroad and damage its democracy at home. Its politics are turning towards ethno-religious chauvinism, seeking to marginalise Arabs and Jewish leftists, including human-rights groups. The government objected even to a novel about a Jewish-Arab love affair. As Israel grows wealthier, the immiseration of Palestinians becomes more disturbing. Its predicament grows more acute as the number of Palestinians between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean catches up with that of Jews. Israel cannot hold on to all of the “Land of Israel”, keep its predominantly Jewish identity and remain a proper democracy. To save democracy, and prevent a slide to racism or even apartheid, it has to give up the occupied lands.

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statista: Where People Think the Economy is Rigged

The Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump to become President of the United States have shown that there is a deep distrust of the elites in many countries. Popular anger is directed towards those who are seen to be rigging the economy (or politics) against the hard working common man.

Just how common this resentment is, if warranted or not, is shown by data provided for by the research institute Ipsos in a recent report. While this chart represents a selection of 10 from 22 countries, the first and last rank indeed are taken Mexico and Sweden.

This chart shows citizens of selected countries that think the economy is rigged in favor of the rich & powerful (in percent)

see the map