Current Table of Contents

• Art.view: China syndrome
  

  London’s Asian art festival is full of surprises

  ASIAN Art in London—the city’s week-long late-autumn flowering of dealers’ shows and daily auctions, which ended on November 7th—was characterised by some beautiful exhibitions, an unprecedented flood of Chinese visitors and an assortment of auction sales that included some lots that went through the roof, others that failed utterly and a few notable pieces that were withdrawn on suspicion that they may have been fakes.

  Christie’s had the hardest time of it. Despite the bullish market for Chinese ceramics and fine art, 104 of the 319 lots offered in its November 3rd auction failed to sell, suggesting that buyers, even those who have travelled far, are quick to punish sellers who are too greedy or cataloguers who are too enthusiastic in their assessments. Gilt-bronze figures were cast aside willy-nilly, as was a consignment of bronze plaques and, perhaps more surprisingly given their popularity, a number of jade animals and figures. ...

• Tech.view: Fighting fire with fire
  

  Wildfires are getting fiercer and more frequent

  AS WOODLANDS in the warmer parts of the northern hemisphere come to the end of their fire season and their counterparts south of the equator prepare for the worst, people have begun to rethink how best to fight the wildfires, which seem to be getting fiercer and more frequent. With less winter snow on mountains as average temperatures rise, woods in many regions are drying out and becoming ever more vulnerable to fire.

  The deadliest wildfire in Australia’s history, which scorched a broad swathe of the landscape north-east of Melbourne earlier this year and killed more than 200 people, has prompted local authorities to question the country’s long-standing policy of allowing residents to stay behind to defend their homes as the flames roar through. Meanwhile, mistakes made in the early stages of a wildfire that raged across the mountains overlooking Los Angeles in August turned a containable blaze into the county’s worst conflagration ever. In both instances, a heatwave following years of drought provided tinder for an arsonist’s match. ...

• Europe.view: An easterner to the front
  

  Could a former president of Latvia make it as the European Union president?

  OPTIMISTIC Latvians are thin on the ground these days. The combination of fractious politics and a dismal economic outlook blunts the enthusiasm of even the most cheerfully patriotic soul. All the more reason, therefore, to applaud the announcement that the country’s former president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is running for the job of president of the European Union.

  At first sight, Ms Vike-Freiberga’s chances seem vanishingly slim. And at a second glance they don’t look much fatter. On the plus side, she speaks perfect French. She is a woman. And she has no big enemies. Observers of Latvian politics in the years 1999-2007 (admittedly, not exactly a mainstream hobby in Brussels) remember her as an uncommonly effective president of that country. She proved a powerful bulwark against over-mighty tycoons bent on suborning Latvia’s independent institutions and a strong defender of probity in public office. ...

• Business.view: How to change the system
  

  In praise of the ideas of Russ Ackoff

  IT IS hard to imagine a less enticing title for a book than “Introduction to Operations Research”. Yet Russ Ackoff, one of the authors of this tome of 1959, who died on October 29th aged 90, did not just help to define a nascent branch of industrial engineering. He wrote 30 other books, becoming one of the most influential management gurus of the 20th century in the process. His ideas about systemic thinking are vitally important today if the world is to come out of the current economic crisis in better shape than it went into it.

  Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ...

• Green.view: Tricks of the trade
  

  Can the world stop governments from paying for the over-exploitation of fish?

  OVERFISHING erodes future prosperity by destroying today a resource that could yield benefits indefinitely. Yet it is subsidised by billions of taxpayer dollars, euros and yen. Now a new chance to halt this insanity has emerged in the unlikely form of climate-change negotiations.

  Landlubbers hand pots of money to fishermen. Rashid Sumaila, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, estimates that in 2003 (the most recent year for which data are available), the world’s fishing subsidies were $25 billion-30 billion. The value of fish landed in the same year was $82 billion. Furthermore, Dr Sumaila reckons that $16 billion of the subsidies either promote overcapacity by helping fishermen buy new or bigger boats or encourage overfishing by subsidising fuel. ...

• Art.view: Out from storage
  

  A successful Romano sale in Florence proves there are exceptions to recessionary rules

  Sotheby’s recent four-day sale of the Salvatore and Francesco Romano collection in Florence contained more than 1,800 lots. International interest in the auction was keen, even though there was not a single masterpiece among the antique statues, Old Master paintings, textiles, pieces of furniture or objets d’art. Many foreign dealers and collectors who had come to Italy for the sumptuous and lively Biennale dell’Antiquarioto (which ended on October 4th) crossed the Arno to the Palazzo Magnani Ferroni for a look even before the official public viewing began. (The auction, which went from October 12th to the 16th, was timed with the Biennale in mind.)

  Once the sale started, as many as 22 employees worked the phones, taking bids from Italy and elsewhere in Europe, America and Russia. The first-floor terrace of the palace was tented for the event, and rows of folding chairs were occupied by a changing cast of paddle wielders, many of them dealers. Others loitered in the vast, art-filled, adjoining rooms waiting for their chosen lots to come up. By its end, the sale made more than €10.5m ($15.5m), exceeding the low estimate by a little more than €72,000. Sotheby’s says it is delighted and so are the consigners. ...

• Tech.view: Seeing in the dark
  

  Car headlamps that turn night into day

  ONE of the most enduring urban myths is how the patent for an ever-lasting light bulb pioneered by a lone inventor was snapped up by a cartel of lighting manufacturers, who promptly secreted it away to protect their hugely profitable replacement business.

  The fact is, lots of long-life bulbs have been invented over the years since Thomas Edison borrowed the best from the dozen or so different light-bulb designs patented during the early days of electrification and came up with a winner. Practically all the improvements in terms of life and brightness since then have come from the bulb-makers themselves. One of the most recent was Philips’s incandescent light bulb that lasts for 60,000 hours. ...

• Europe.view: Linguistic discontents
  

  Slovaks, Hungarians and missing data

  THE row is over but the problems remain. Amid an outcry from neighbouring Hungary, and discreet pressure from other outsiders, Slovakia’s government has backed away, for the moment, from implementing its badly drafted and intrusive-sounding new language law (see article).

  Despite the backdown, hopes that membership of the European Union and NATO would bring a permanent end to central Europe’s tribal conflicts and historical grudges now look over-optimistic. It would be good if all concerned—the Slovak government, Hungarians in Slovakia and Hungary’s political parties—paused for reflection about the troubling issues that divide them. But the economic crisis, and the likely victory of the tough-talking Viktor Orban and his right-of-centre Fidesz party in Hungary’s parliamentary elections next year, are among the reasons for expecting another flare-up sooner rather than later. ...

• Business.view: Cash for votes
  

  A glimmer of hope for corporate-governance reform

  AMERICA’S system of elections for the boards of companies has long been a sort of Potemkin village: impressive, until you lean on it. Yes, there is one share, one vote. But only candidates proposed by the incumbent board make it on to the ballot that the firm sends to shareholders. Other candidates can seek votes only by circulating “proxies” of their own to shareholders, at the candidates’ own expense. The cost of this is usually enough to deter them, allowing the official slate of directors to retain their lucrative boardroom sinecures uncontested—even if only a tiny proportion of shareholders actually vote for them.

  Several efforts to make it easier for shareholders to nominate directors have been frustrated by lobbying from corporate turkeys keen to postpone Christmas for as long as they can. Earlier this month the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced yet another year’s delay before it again considers proposals to ease outsiders’ access to proxies. Earlier attempts to bring reforms failed in 2003 and 2007, again due to furious corporate lobbying. ...

• Green.view: Freaking out
  

  The controversy over SuperFreakonomics

  FOOLS rush in where climatologists fear to tread. That, at least, is what critics are saying about a book called “SuperFreakonomics”, which was published on October 20th. Its authors are self-proclaimed “rogue economist” Steven Levitt, of the University of Chicago, and his swashbuckling sidekick Stephen Dubner, a journalist. The internet is now alight with controversy about a chapter in the book that examines climate change.

  The book is a sequel to “Freakonomics”. This newspaper, among many others, gave that work a glowing review as an unconventional look into the hidden economic forces behind imponderables such as estate agents’ fees and cheating sumo-wrestlers. The book’s approach was, and is, compelling: applying the tool of economic analysis to unusual, everyday situations to provide an objective view of the self-interests of self-interested parties. Readers felt they understood the world a little better as they learned why most drug dealers live at home, for example (the profits go to gang leaders). Crunch the numbers, the book insisted, and it all makes sense. ...

• Art.view: Climbing back
  

  Heartening contemporary art sales in London

  WHAT a difference a year makes. The contemporary art sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York last November were furnished with works which had been consigned over the summer, when the market was still a jolly place. Reserves were optimistic and many consignors had been offered guarantees to entice them to sell. After the Dow crashed 500 points on September 15th 2008—the same day that saw the collapse of Lehman, a Wall Street firm that had survived 19th-century railway bankruptcies and the Great Depression, buyers of contemporary art suddenly froze. November in New York was grim. Picture after picture failed to reach its reserve and the sales saw the largest number of lots bought in for nearly two decades. The two auction houses paid out more than $80m in guarantees.

  Prices of contemporary art at auction have dropped 50% or more in the year since. The withdrawal of guarantees (except in exceptional cases) has caused many consignors to hang on their work, which explains why, according to calculations made by ArtTactic, a London-based research firm, the volume of sales at contemporary-art auctions over the period has dropped by as much as 80%. ...

• Tech.view: Microsoft's seventh seal
  

  Windows 7 is all its hapless precedessor should have been

  NOT since the launch of Windows 95 more than a decade ago has your correspondent seen such a fuss over a new piece of software. In some cities, people lined up all night outside computer stores for Windows 7, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, which went on sale to the public on October 22nd. Orders taken before that date for Windows 7 by Amazon were the biggest in the online retailer’s history, grossing more than even the latest Harry Potter book.

  Customers will not be disappointed. Windows 7 is all its unlamented predecessor, Windows Vista, should have been. It does not hog resources anything like as much as Vista did, making it a far sprightlier performer. It will even run on diminutive netbooks that currently have to use leaner Linux or Windows XP operating systems because of Vista’s girth and weight. ...

• Europe.view: Welcome home
  

  It is high time to abolish the concept of ethnic minorities

  SHOULD the Polish ethnic minority in Germany have the same rights as the German ethnic minority in Poland? It sounds fair: Germans in Poland get schooling in the mother-tongue, street signs in both languages and guaranteed representation in parliament. Poles in Germany get almost nothing. But why only the Poles? What about the Czechs and Hungarians? Or the Turks? For that matter, what about the British in Poland? They have their cultural festivals (Last Night of the Proms in Cracow is already a major annual event). And why are we talking only about in Poland? The British minority in Slovakia may not be quite as big as the Hungarian one, but it has its quirks too—such as playing cricket.

  Getting silly about all of this is easy; finding a sensible rule is more difficult. Size clearly matters, but how small is too small? Surely the smaller minorities are the ones that most need protection. And the biggest ones (Mingrelians in Georgia, for example) are hardly minorities at all. ...

• Green.view: Letting a thousand flowers wither
  

  The world will not halt the rate of reduction of biodiversity by 2010

  SEEKING to alleviate poverty, reduce world hunger and protect biodiversity sounds, to your correspondent’s ears, like something a Miss World hopeful might have pledged in the 1980s. In fact, it was what a professor of soil quality at a lesser-known university in the Netherlands promised to a scientific conference that concluded on October 16th.

  Addressing hundreds of biologists, ecologists and social scientists who were meeting in Cape Town under the auspices of Diversitas, an interdisciplinary group of researchers, Lijbert Brussaard of Wageningen University outlined progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals agreed by members of the United Nations in 2001. One of the targets was to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss of biodiversity. That has not happened. Neither will it do so next year. ...

• Business.view: Heads I win, tails you lose
  

  Why Wall Street needs a new social contract

  EVER since Rolling Stone magazine described Goldman Sachs in July as a “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” the investment bank has emerged as the favourite pinata for anyone who wants to give Wall Street a mighty thwack. Lloyd Blankfein, the investment bank’s chief executive, may be right, as he recently told The Economist, that vampire squids, which really do exist in the depths of the ocean, are “small and harmless”. Yet his firm and the industry of which it is now the reluctant face have a real image problem, which they need to deal with before it turns into something nastier.

  Among the wilder allegations the industry is facing is Michael Moore’s claim in his new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, that a deliberate Wall Street conspiracy resulted in a $700 billion raid by the banks on the Treasury (otherwise known as the Troubled Asset Relief Programme). Mr Moore’s film includes a stunt in which he attempts a citizen’s arrest of Mr Blankfein over this “crime”. ...

• Art.view: A fair price
  

  Deliberative buyers and young artists at London's Frieze Art Fair

  The work on display at London's Frieze Art Fair, which opened to VIPs on October 14th, was as covetable and intellectually intriguing as ever. The gallerists had come from New Delhi to Doha, from San Francisco to Seoul—not to mention that well-flown axis from New York to Berlin and the East End of London. Sales were reportedly much better than last year, when shopping was stalled by the shock of financial freefall. As Andrew Silewicz, a director at Spruth Magers Gallery, admitted, “You know that you're in a recession but, for a recession, it’s not at all bad.”

  Artists seemed to have responded to recent times. Zero, a Milan gallery, had a completely empty white-walled stand except for a small painting by Victor Man of a hand and a puff of smoke. New York's Gavin Brown's Enterprises devoted its booth to canvases by Rirkrit Tiravanija that were covered in newspapers with the phrase “THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY IS NUMBERED” written in large colourful letters. Madrid's Galeria Helga de Alvear displayed a sculpture by Elmgreen and Dragset that evoked one of Giacometti's walking men, but this one dragged a ball and chain. “The Giacometti estate are making so many, we thought we'd join in,” joked Michael Elmgreen. ...

• Tech.view: Down with the flu
  

  Two different viruses will lay millions low this winter

  IT HAS taken seven months for the vaccine intended to protect people from the potentially deadly H1N1 strain of influenza to start trickling onto pharmacy shelves. The first doses are now being made available in America. Supplies will remain limited for months to come. In the meantime, the vaccine—both the killed version that is injected and the attenuated live version that is given as a nasal spray—is being rationed to those reckoned most in need.

  That means children, pregnant women, nursing staff and those who could easily infect other vulnerable groups—especially infants and people with weakened immune systems. Strangely, the new H1N1 strain of virus does not strike the elderly anything like as much as seasonal flu does. This relative immunity—the opposite of what normally happens each winter—suggests that they may have been exposed to something similar in the past. ...

• Europe.view: Unoccupied Britain
  

  It looks simpler from across the Channel

  TWEAK history a bit. Imagine that in 1940 Hitler and Stalin divide Britain between them. Both occupying powers behave abominably but in different ways. After a rigged election, Scotland is declared part of the Soviet Union. Stalin imposes a one-party state and planned economy with a terrifying secret-police apparatus, liquidating normal life and decapitating the country. Tens of thousands of people—lawyers, teachers, businessmen, priests, journalists, and even philatelists—are woken in the small hours, given ten minutes to pack and then deported to slave labour camps in northern Norway. Few ever return.

  South of the border, the Nazi military dictatorship rounds up England’s Jews, supported by local anti-Semitic collaborators. Industry is commandeered by the Nazi war machine. Anti-Nazi activity is lethal; thousands are shipped off to work as forced labourers. Others, disgracefully, even volunteer as concentration-camp guards and for auxiliary police battalions in the hope of gaining privileges or settling scores. Life is dire, but for most of the non-Jewish population it is much less awful than in the Scottish Soviet Socialist Republic. ...

• Business.view: Down Mexico
  

  Brazil-envy is rife in Latin America’s other big economy

  WHEN Brazil was not only included but named first among the BRICs, the widely used acronym for the leading emerging economies, Mexican business leaders protested that their country should also have been there. Well, maybe. But adding an "M" to the initial letters of Brazil, Russia, India and China would have made the name much less catchy (MBRICs? BRIMCs?). And the man who coined the acronym in 2001, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, has said that Mexico (along with South Korea) was in fact considered, but did not quite fit.

  Mexico’s Brazil-envy is more intense than ever, as this columnist discovered last week in Mexico City. One local business leader said he was optimistic about the economic outlook, but that was because “I choose to be, because I don’t want the alternative—and, besides, next year can’t be any worse than this, can it?” Others mostly seemed worried, predicting several difficult years ahead. ...