Nov 18th 2021

The triumph of big government

The world this week

Leaders

Bureaucracy unbound

The world is entering a new era of big government

How should classical liberals respond?

Barbarians at the garden gate

Hostility towards private equity’s push into property is misguided

Big investors are filling a gap in the market

The next Afghanistan

How not to lose the war on terror in Africa

To prevail against jihadists in the Sahel the West must learn from past mistakes

From role-model to cautionary tale

Chile’s voters are on the verge of a terrible mistake

Two extremists are leading in the polls for this week’s presidential election

The future of the internet

Don’t mock the metaverse

The metaverse is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed

Letters

On vaccine passports, maths, Western Sahara, climate change, Joe Biden, French acronyms

Letters to the editor

Briefing

A hard trend to buck

Governments are not going to stop getting bigger

Some factors which drive the process are eternal and some are getting stronger

United States

Scott free

MacKenzie Scott is giving away more money, faster, than anyone has before

Provoking questions

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse shows America’s divide over guns

Answered prayers

America’s Catholic schools are seeing a surprising rise in enrolment

Where did it all go so right?

Puerto Rico, success story

Spending and voting

Will Democrats be rewarded for spending lots of money?

Drug deals

Democrats have a plan to lower drug costs without hurting innovation

Lexington

Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job

The Americas

Pole positions

Chile’s presidential election is a contest between extremes

Chilly reception

Chile makes life harder for immigrants

A rose, but no uprising

Cuba’s government squelches a planned nationwide protest

Bello

Will electoral defeat favour moderation in Argentina?

Asia

The embrace of the motherland

Chinese propagandists court South-East Asia’s Chinese diaspora

Succession

Philippine President Duterte’s daughter spurns him and his job

Some cause for pride

Support for gay rights in Japan is gaining momentum

Hooked on handouts

The Indian government’s addiction to subsidies has dire effects

Banyan

Russia moves with a new swagger in South-East Asia

China

Soaking it up

To prevent floods, China is building “sponge cities”

The grey walls of China

Chinese officials help to cultivate a local graffiti scene

Chaguan

Talks between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden do not herald a thaw

Middle East & Africa

Sahel in a handbasket

Why the war against jihadists in Mali is going badly

Whodunnit

A string of bombings is rattling Uganda

Spies against crime

The murder rate rises among Arab-Israelis

Bad smells everywhere

Tunisia gets violent over landfills

Pitch darkness

Even football has become mired in Lebanon’s political and economic crises

Europe

Bleak is chic

France is doing well, but feeling miserable

Borderline case

The EU’s stand-off with Belarus is complicating its row with Poland

Caucasian degeneration

Near death in jail, Georgia’s former president defies its current one

Atomic jitters

Allies fear Germany’s incoming government will go soft on nukes

Permanent partition?

Putting Cyprus together may be impossible

Charlemagne

Last of the commies

Britain

Emergency care

The NHS faces a bleak winter

Just not cricket

Azeem Rafiq claims anti-Asian abuse is widespread in English cricket

Blue light

British Indians are emerging as an important group of swing voters

All change

Britain’s economy does not lack oomph, but productivity is lagging

Social mobility

Britain’s inequalities are spelt out in its surnames

On the dock

The government wants to ensure that tax breaks for freeports aren’t wasted

Bagehot

Britain’s establishment has split into two, each convinced it is the underdog

International

After COP26

The Glasgow summit left a huge hole in the world’s plans to curb climate change

Business

The Party capitalists

China’s communist authorities are tightening their grip on the private sector

Royal purge

Shell mulls a breakup

Bartleby

The business phrasebook

Monet, Manet, Money

An auction at Sotheby’s raises $676m

The future of the internet

The video-game industry has metaverse ambitions, too

Chugging along

Times are good for American railways

Schumpeter

Walmart gets its bite back

We’re hiring

Wanted: a new senior business writer

Finance & economics

Material needs

China seeks to extend its clout in commodity markets

Houdini economics

Germany grapples with weird ways to dodge its debt brake

Land of the falling price

The case of Japan’s curiously quiescent inflation rate

Buttonwood

Baillie Gifford and the three quandaries of fund management

Patch-up job

As housing costs rocket, governments take aim at large investors

Lifting off

Frequent-flyer schemes provide airlines with a lifeline

Lost promise

The violence in Ethiopia imperils an impressive growth record

Free exchange

Janos Kornai understood capitalism by studying its opposite

Science & technology

Covid animal reservoirs

SARS-CoV-2 could be lurking in animal hidey-holes

Autism

How an upset gut microbiome is tied to autism

ASATs and the ISS

A Russian anti-satellite missile test puts the ISS in peril

Culture

The less accused

Far-right ideas are gaining a renewed respectability in France

Artificial intelligence

Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt take on AI

Marking time

How the seven-day week came to rule the world

Brave new worlds

The travails and bold aims of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

An Immensa cock-up

Botched covid-19 test results in Britain led to thousands of extra cases

Obituary

Builder and dismantler