Current Table of Contents

• Art.view: Colour me dazzled
  

  Record auction prices for rare coloured diamonds

  “If you have money to invest, there is no safer haven than something rare,” says Laurence Graff, the London-born “King of Diamonds”. If this is sales talk, he is his own best customer. In December 2008, during some of the bleakest days of the credit crisis, Mr Graff paid $24.3m for the 35.56-carat, 17th-century Wittelsbach blue diamond at Christie’s in London. He set the auction record for any jewel. But in his opinion, “it was the bargain of the century. In my life, it is the rarest of them all; it is the supreme coloured diamond.”

  Yet Mr Graff felt it could be improved. His team began work on the Wittelsbach almost immediately. It was a daring, even daredevil, move. When he bought the historic diamond it worked out at $1.46m per carat. As a result of polishing it weighs four carats less. This could be calculated as a loss of about $6m, but not by Mr Graff. He values the Wittelsbach-Graff, as the gem is now called, at $100m. “We have given it life which it didn’t have before,” he explains. Many may soon judge for themselves. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has been in discussions with Graff regarding the possibility of a public presentation of the diamond at the National Museum of Natural History. ...

• Tech.view: Sod it
  

  The latest plastic pitches are a goal-scorer’s delight

  IT’S official: the grass is greener in Europe. International football’s governing body, FIFA, has ruled that the soccer pitches in South Africa where the World Cup will be played next summer are not fit enough for the month-long competition. Pitches planted with locally grown kikuyu grass will have to be dug up and replanted with lush European rye grass.

  No matter that the European turf, bred for a damper and cooler climate, will require more water, fertiliser and maintenance. FIFA is adamant: the hardy local stuff is not green enough for international television. Of course, once the final whistle has blown and the television crews have dispersed, the pitches will need to be resown at great expense with grass fit for South African conditions. ...

• Europe.view: Looking eastwards, even further
  

  Could China fill a power vacuum in eastern Europe?

  AS THE countries of eastern Europe bump nervously between a near-neutralist Germany, a revisionist Russia and an absent-minded America, the search is on for a powerful outsider, with strong interests in the region, willing to put all kinds of clout behind the smaller countries’ sovereignty and independence.

  Once, Britain filled that role. The Royal Navy helped the Baltic states win their independence after the first world war. Britain also ruled the southern part of Georgia as a protectorate from 1918 to 1920 and sent a daring expedition to Baku to push back the Bolshevik presence there. But Britain’s imperial star, with the shame and glory that it brought, has waned. Who can fill the gap? ...

• Green.view: The rise of slime
  

  Warmer water is exacerbating problems in the oceans

  THE fishermen of Kokongi, Japan, have seen record hauls this year. They are not, however, very happy. Their nets are trapping jellyfish: giant, gelatinous, wobbly and worthless. Jellyfish were once rare along these shores, but are now an almost annual occurrence.

  It is the same story in many other parts of the world. Jellyfish are blamed for damaging fishing, shutting down power and desalination plants, and upsetting swimmers. ...

• Business.view: Start-up nations
  

  A drive to turn the whole world into entrepreneurs

  AN OPPOSITION is supposed to oppose, of course—but Britain’s Conservative Party, poised on the brink of power, is sending an odd message by pledging to scrap the country’s annual Enterprise Week, which began this year on November 16th. Apparently, this is because Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is a well-known supporter of the week, and the Conservatives believe that every week should be Enterprise Week. “We need a focus on enterprise and entrepreneurship 52 weeks of the year,” according to Mark Prisk, a party spokesman.

  Well, certainly, you can have too many days, weeks or years dedicated to some cause or other. But Enterprise Week has proved such a success since its launch in 2004 that 86 other countries have adopted it, and it has been transformed into Global Entrepreneurship Week. It is prompting a global debate about how to increase the spread and impact of entrepreneurship that, given the lacklustre state of many economies—not least Britain’s—could scarcely be more timely. ...

• Art.view: Dollars, cents and sensibility
  

  Warhol and Doig do it again

  This week in New York, the post-war and contemporary art market had its bi-annual check up. Christie’s went first, selling 39 of 46 lots for a total of $74.1m on November 10th. It was less than a quarter of their $325m total exactly two years ago, but still a respectable outcome given the difficulty of obtaining consignments. No one wants to sell their art during a recession unless they have to. Remarkably, few collectors seem to be in that position and, if they are, they feel safer off-loading behind the scenes than at public auction.

  Sotheby’s evening sale was much more robust, selling 53 of 55 lots for a total of $134.4m. That sell-through rate—96% by lot, 98% by value—hadn't been seen since 2004. An astounding result given the times. The estate of Mary and Louis Myers, Ohio arts patrons, provided the first 20 lots of the evening, but the chief earner was Andy Warhol. ...

• Tech.view: Computer-aided crash?
  

  How to stop a car when it accelerates out of control

  EVER had your car’s throttle stick wide open? It is an unnerving experience. You try frantically to get your toe under the accelerator pedal to flip it back up, while straining to avoid other road users. Seconds later, when you start thinking straight, you slip the transmission into neutral, coast carefully to the side of the road, apply the handbrake and switch off the roaring engine.

  The first, and only, time it happened to your correspondent, the cause was a broken return-spring on the carburettor’s butterfly valves. A quick roadside fix—a rubber band to keep the throttle open just wide enough to potter along—allowed him to limp home by judiciously slipping the clutch and applying the brakes. ...

• Europe.view: The beginning of the end
  

  What Ronald Reagan meant for Eastern Europe

  “MR GORBACHEV, tear down this wall”. Ronald Reagan’s stirring speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12th 1987 was not the death blow to communism, but it did highlight the West’s renewed confidence in demanding what had previously been impossible. Though the president’s advisers egged him on, American diplomats were horrified at what they felt was provocative behaviour: they saw their job as managing relations with communism, not trying to overturn it.

  Those glory days were the subject of a day-long conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California on November 6th. A motley collection of heroes from east and west (with your columnist tagging along as a moderator) gathered to discuss the great communicator’s role in the collapse of communism and what his approach could still offer today. Nancy Reagan, frail but immaculate, presided. Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev sent messages of congratulation. Freedom fighters such as Mart Laar from Estonia, Leszek Balcerowicz from Poland and Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic recalled how Reagan’s approach had inspired them and demoralised their captors. ...

• Business.view: Battle of the trustbusters
  

  The European Commission again objects to a deal approved by the United States Department of Justice

  ONCE every few years, it seems, the European Commission likes to flex its muscles by going head to head with the toughest, most uncompromising American chief executive it can find. In 2001 it took on the legendary prizefighter “Neutron Jack” Welch of General Electric. Now it has come out swinging against Oracle’s martial-arts grandmaster Larry Ellison. (As the old joke goes: “What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”)

  Now, as then, the battleground is antitrust law. And once again it is not just the American bosses who are feeling the pain of a left-hook from Brussels—so too is America’s Department of Justice, which has approved a merger only for its counterparts in the European Commission to object to it. In 2001 the European trustbusters opposed GE’s $42 billion acquisition of Honeywell—a deal already given the thumbs-up by America’s antitrust officials. On November 9th the commission issued a “statement of objections” (see article) to Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which the Department of Justice approved in August. ...

• Green.view: A matter of faith
  

  Environmentalism is given the same weight as religion in British employment laws

  “A BELIEF in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperatives is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

  Those were the words of an English High Court judge, Mr Justice Burton, on November 3rd as he ruled that green beliefs deserve the same protection in the workplace as religious convictions. A person’s right to believe in anthropogenic climate change, and not be hounded out of his job because of it, is now enshrined in law. ...

• 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 almost 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. ...