In 1643 Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. The then-emperor, Chongzhen, didn’t bother with warning labels. He outlawed growing and smoking the leaf. Violators were to be beheaded. (As it happens, a year later, the Ming dynasty and Chongzhen were both dead, neither from blackened lungs.)
Attitudes to smoking have changed somewhat since then. Today a carton of smokes is one of the most popular gifts in China, especially at the Chinese new year. In tobacco-rich Yunnan, the cigarette industry is a local pillar. Many advances over the centuries have taken place in the processing, packaging and marketing of tobacco. Top-end brands can sell for $25 a packet (and some are proudly labelled “organic”). On health warnings however, progress has been slight: packets bear a simple, generic message printed in text, with no eye-catching images.
“Where’s the Party?”:
How can the party maintain control over a place that, in ideological terms, is no longer communist? The closure in the 1990s of vast numbers of state-owned enterprises shattered the party’s grassroots base. Over the past decade a priority of the party’s secretive Organisation Department (it handles personnel issues for the 80m-strong party, yet has no listed telephone number) has been to form party cells in private businesses, or “new economic organisations” as the official literature calls them. In 1999 only 3% of private businesses had party cells. Now the national figure is nearly 13%. Coastal Zhejiang province claims all private firms with more than 80 employees have a branch.
As party officials see it, setting up branches in the private sector is about more than just proving that a once-revolutionary party is still in touch with the masses. At a time of rapid social change and outbreaks of unrest, officials hope the new party branches will reinforce stability and keep the party abreast of potential trouble.
Politically, however, the problem is that Mr. Hester is working for a (largely) state-owned company at a time when other public sector employees are suffering a wage freeze, benefits are being cut and so on. It is very difficult to argue that “we are all in the same boat” if one state employee is being handed a luxury yacht. Doubtless, there are many teachers, doctors and nurses who are doing a fantastic job but they won’t get a bonus either.
— Buttonwood’s Notebook: “How Can You Judge a Bank CEO?”
![Charlemagne’s Notebook: “At Bursting Point?”:
This grotesque map of the world, depicting Europe as a bloated balloon, caught my eye this week, and powerfully illustrates one of the factors in Europe’s debt crisis. It depicts the countries of the world sized according to the amount of government spending.
In the words of the World Bank, which published it in its a report issued this week[,] … Europe is the world’s “lifestyle superpower”. As opposed to America, which spends almost as much as the rest of the world put together on defence, Europe more than the rest of the globe combined on social policies.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lygkyeMuwY1qbg2gho1_500.jpg)
Charlemagne’s Notebook: “At Bursting Point?”:
This grotesque map of the world, depicting Europe as a bloated balloon, caught my eye this week, and powerfully illustrates one of the factors in Europe’s debt crisis. It depicts the countries of the world sized according to the amount of government spending.
In the words of the World Bank, which published it in its a report issued this week[,] … Europe is the world’s “lifestyle superpower”. As opposed to America, which spends almost as much as the rest of the world put together on defence, Europe more than the rest of the globe combined on social policies.
Early on in the era of New Labour, it is claimed, Mr. Prescott was due at a palace reception to meet his sovereign. Among his Labour colleagues there was much speculation as to whether he would bow to the queen or defy what he surely considered the snobbish, southern tomfoolery of court etiquette. The moment arrived, the pair were introduced, and the queen politely greeted her deputy prime minister… in a suddenly tiny voice. Straining to hear, Mr. Prescott bent down. Oh, so John’s bowed then, murmured his colleagues.
— Bagehot’s Notebook: “Seen and Thus Believed: Britain Falls Back in Love With Its Dutiful, Tireless Monarch”
Fix the value of money and the burden of adjustment falls on other parts of the economy. Countries abandoned the gold standard in the 1930s because democratically-elected politicians found themselves unable to impose the kind of austerity required to maintain their gold reserves (the 1931 British Labour government balked at a 20% cut in unemployment benefit, for example). The economic historian, Barry Eichengreen, found that the earlier a country left the gold standard, the quicker its economy recovered. He also suggests, very plausibly, that it was easier to stick to the gold standard in the 19th century because many workers did not have the vote.
— Buttonwood’s Notebook: “How Fixed Would a Gold Standard Actually Be?”
“The Last Kodak Moment?”:
Lenin is said to have sneered that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him. The quote may be spurious, but it contains a grain of truth. Capitalists quite often invent the technology that destroys their own business.
Eastman Kodak is a picture-perfect example. It built one of the first digital cameras in 1975. That technology, followed by the development of smartphones that double as cameras, has battered Kodak’s old film- and camera-making business almost to death.
For Mr. Salmond to act dismayed by anti-English grumbling requires a degree of political chutzpah bordering on performance art. He is the man who once accused Margaret Thatcher of imposing a “government of occupation” on Scots, and referred to the British government’s taxation of oil revenues from Scottish waters as probably “the greatest act of international larceny since the Spanish stole the Inca gold”.
— Bagehot’s Notebook: “Alex Salmond, Little Englander”.
It is a little like a group of old soaks in the golf club bar, deciding to vote on whether to stay with their ill-favoured wives, divorce them, or seek a free love arrangement. Suitably emboldened by gin, they can vote for free love if they like. That does not mean their spouses will agree.
— Bagehot’s Notebook: “The House of Commons Ponders Free Love, or the EU Equivalent”
Something about money makes people a little crazy. Perhaps it’s the essential weirdness of money itself. When you switch from a barter economy to one based on units of exchange, the broad acceptability of units of exchange, whatever they may be, invests in them a value disconnected from their intrinsic worth. This is just as true of gold as it is of fiat currency.
— Free Exchange: “Monetary Policy: Money Delusion”.
